concentration ideas
- A specific place during different times of day, weather, or seasons of the year (color, light, mood) -
- Water: how we use/experience it - drinking, bathing, swimming, washing, as a resource (light, color, nostalgia) -
- Portraiture and reflection - Alain Laboile,
- Celebrations: birthdays, holidays, traditions, parties, personal or group -
- Urban textures and abstractions- Ernst Haas
- Environmental Portraiture -
- 3-D objects existing in a 2-D world - Robin Rhodes,
- Street Photography - Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Beaches: showing the beach through different times of day and people that are drawn to it for different reasons - Craig Litten
- Ego/Alter-Ego - Yeondoo Jung
- Using depth of field to see in a way incapable of by the eye, abstractions - Victor Schrager
- Reflections and abstractions - Jan Groover
- Shadows and light abstractions -
- A girl in her room - Raneya Mattar
Encounters, Experiences and Meetings
- The meeting between mother and child / adoption / birth;
- The clashing of those who despise each other;
- Friends in a bustling and crowded restaurant;
- SEX and other forbidden encounters in a teenage world;
- The shields we put up in our brains: the filter between ourselves and those we meet;
- The joining (or meeting) of two halves;
- Meetings between strangers…The million people we pass on a daily basis, but never connect with;
- Drunken encounters;
- Encounters with god;
- Online encounters and the changing social landscape of the world;
- The clashing of cultures;
- Meeting someone who has suffered a great loss;
- Shameful encounters / those you regret;
- A meeting room, filled with business people who go about their daily lives in a trance;
- A boisterous meeting between children;
- A birthday party;
- Meeting at a skateboard park;
- Reunion at an airport;
- Meeting for the last time;
- A life-changing moment;
- Focus on the senses (an event experienced through sight / audio etc);
- Something that made you cry;
- A déjà vu experience;
- Remembering an experience a long time ago: the passing of time / generations;
- The meeting of truth and lies;
- The meeting of fiction and reality;
- Encountering animals: the interaction between human and animal kind and our influence upon them (for good or bad);
- Meeting your childhood self or yourself fifty years in the future;
- The meeting of land and sea;
- Physical meetings between two things: the boundaries and edges, perhaps at a cellular level (plunging into / stabbing / tearing apart);
- The meeting of theory and practicality;
- How our own biases, backgrounds and modify/influence every experience we have: the influence of the mind;
- Truly seeing yourself as you really are;
- Conception;
- The aftermath of a meeting that never happened;
- Meeting temptation: the battle of wills;
- The meeting of technology and nature;
- Ancient man meeting the modern world: the conflict between genes and the modern environment;
- Terrorist encounter.
- A young child holding the hand of their mother;
- Bad influences (combinations of friends) and peer pressure;
- A family unit, in alliance against the world;
- The butterfly effect (how a combination of actions / behaviours leads from one thing to another until every tiny moment in a life is interwoven with all the moments that came before);
- Political alliances;
- How ‘good’ people can complete horrific acts when lead on by the wrong situation and the wrong company;
- Still life combinations: salt and pepper, sweet and sour, fish & chips, apple and cinnamon; peanut butter and jam; the literal combination of ingredients used to make a meal;
- Unpleasant combinations we would rather not be reminded of: chocolate and obesity; that cute lamb and the juicy steak;
- The legal binding (combination) of lovers: marriage / civil unions;
- Combination of genes: Darwin’s theory of evolution – how traits are passed on etc;
- A study of two people (or animals), or people who care about each other;
- A person and something that they use to embellish their identity (i.e. fast car, makeup, fashion accessories, label clothing, iPhones);
- You and the one thing that defines you;
- Twins;
- Siblings;
- Mismatched couples;
- Unfortunate combinations: drugs and celebrities; childbirth and pain; cats and water; sugar and tooth decay;
- Discipline and being cruel to be kind;
- Combinations of exercises / sets / routines;
- Mixing of light (light streaming through coloured glass windows etc);
- Lock combinations;
- Combinations of numbers – gambling, addiction;
- An uneasy alliance: a dog about to break its chain;
- Things that depend on each other for survival: a plant growing in dirt trapped in a hole in the rocks; tiny creatures that live in on the fur / skin of others – ticks on cows / hair lice / germs;
- Vaccinations and the alliance of ‘good’ germs fighting against bad…
- Eco-systems – the interconnection of water / life etc;
- A trusted alliance: horse and rider; blind person and guide dog;
- Business networks that rely on one another;
- Uniting against a common enemy.
- Highly accurate, scientific records;
- The layering of time;
- Disintegration and memory;
- Bones: the structure of life – the architecture of a living form;
- Fish skeletons;
- Archaeology and the documenting of fossils;
- Unexpected items as fossils (i.e. a fossil of an iPod or other contemporary object – remnants of a modern existence);
- Dinosaurs / extinction.
- Modern diet / processed food;
- Digital technology and the impact it has on our lives;
- Soaring depression levels / the psychiatric torment of modern man;
- Soaring caesarian rates;
- Drugs and mind-numbing forms of escape;
- Slowing down;
- More, more, more: ever increasing consumption;
- The mechanised processes involved in the production of meat: pigs in tiny cages / battery hens / images from an abattoir;
- Disconnection from the whole: i.e. a factory worker who spends his/her whole life assembling one tiny part of a product, without having any input into the big picture: disillusionment with life purpose.
- Framing / windows;
- Blurring of the boundary between inside and out;
- Prisons / loss of freedom;
- Breaking in the exterior barrier of things i.e. injuries in flesh resulting in the spilling out of insides;
- Autopsy;
- Opening a can of preserved fruit;
- Pregnancy /birth;
- Shelter from the rain;
- The inconsistency between what is going on in the outside world and the inner turmoil of someone’s brain;
- The change in state as something moves from outside to inside the human body (i.e. food > energy);
- An environment that is devoid of ‘outside’ i.e. fluorescent lights / poor ventilation…lacking in plant life…unable to see nature outdoors…the dwindling human condition etc;
- Apocalyptic future: what will happen if humans destroy the outdoor conditions; or a wall is erected to keep an infected virus-ridden population ‘outside’;
- The peeling back of interesting things to expose what is underneath (inside)…i.e. banana skins, seedpods, envelopes.
- Vegetables or interesting fruit sliced through to expose the insides (things with lots of seed / pips / bumpy skin etc);
- Something opening to reveal something unexpected (i.e. inside a cardboard box);
- The Impossible Staircase: indoors blending into outdoors in an indeterminable fashion / a blurring of dimensions;
- Inside the human body: complex, organic form: the miracle of life (human anatomy drawings / x-rays;
- Inside an animal carcass;
- The human ‘outside’ – an exterior presented to those around us. The fixation we have on creating the best exterior possible: weight control/dieting; makeup; cosmetic surgery; latest fashions;
- Inside the earth: minerals / geology / the underworld;
- Sectional views through a landscape (i.e. showing a slice through the ground / inside the earth): mines / slips / erosion / quarries, with trucks and machinery taking soil and rocks away;
- The soul: inside / outside – leaving the body;
- Plays upon storage and scale, i.e. miniature ‘scaled down’ items inside other items, like large wild animals stored inside tiny jars;
- Castings of the insides of objects – things you don’t normally think about – that are then exposed for all to see;
- Walls / divisions / outsiders;
- Deterioration that has occurred to something as a result of being left outside (i.e. an ice sculpture that is left in the sun or a decayed, rusted, weathered structure showing the long term effects of the elements);
- Light streaming in a window from outside;
- Kids in a daycare facility looking longingly outside;
- Animals in a small enclosure: a sorry life in comparison to those wild and free outside;
- Looking outside from an unusual perspective, i.e. as if you are a mouse looking through a small crack into a room;
- Inside a bomb shelter;
- Inside is meant to equal haven / shelter: what if inside is not this at all: a crime scene / an inside that has been violated;
- In the palm of your hand;
- The contents of something spilling out;
- Shellfish or snails inside their shells.
- Love and hate relationships / fighting between families and loved ones;
- The human mind, swinging from joy to misery and despair / schizophrenia / the meddling mind: our own worst enemy;
- A whole lot of similar things, with one different thing that clashes with the rest;
- Disturbing of the peace: a beautiful scene which is rudely interrupted (i.e. a hunter firing a bullet into a grazing herd of animals or someone pulling out a gun in a crowded shopping mall);
- Musical interpretations: jazz bands / instruments / broken instruments;
- Money: the root of good and evil;
- The broken family / divorce / merged families;
- The clashing of humans with the environment;
- Something beautiful and ugly;
- Meditation to escape the discord of modern day life;
- Prescribed medication (happy pills) to minimise the discord in life – but eliminates the harmony?
- A visual battle: a mess of clashing colours;
- Things in the wrong environment: placing objects unexpectedly in different locations to create discord (or at least alertness and aliveness) a scene of apparent harmony.
- Erosion;
- Changing seasons;
- The impact of human waste / litter on the environment;
- Urban sprawl;
- Forests cut down to make way for new developments;
- The pattern of crops, farming and paddocks on the land.
- Black holes / stars / solar systems / the big bang;
- Skateboarders or snowboarders;
- A drug induced high;
- Cloud formations / the science of rain;
- Flying in sleep;
- Views from an aeroplane window;
- Patterns humans have made in the landscape – i.e. motorways / city grids;
- Hang-gliding / hot air balloons / free fallings / parachuting;
- Insects / birds flying;
- Wing structures;
- Airports;
- Aftermath of a plane crash;
- Superman / superheroes
- Things blowing into the air (old newspapers / an open briefcase / seed pods / dandelion seeds);
- Falling off a high rise building;
- Paper aeroplanes;
- Giants / over-scaled items
- A inner cityscape of high rise buildings – glimpses through windows to people living lives contained in tiny capsules in skyscrapers;
- Athletes / sports people leaping through air.
- An intricate still life that creates shadows which become an integral element of the composition;
- Translucent sculptures;
- Images containing only shadow (without the source object);
- Woven shadows;
- Overlapping shadows from multiple light sources;
- Shadows that are not of the object shown;
- A dark alleyway or other location where the lighting conditions are dramatic;
- Photographs of paper sculptures: artificial manipulation of form to explore light and shadow;
- Skin colour;
- A monochromatic subject, with the emphasis on tone (light & shade) rather than colour;
- Sunhats and sunscreen / skin cancer;
- Buildings with visible shading screens built into the facade.
- Toilet symbols in airports with crowds of people of multiple ethnicities (i.e. icons communicating without language);
- An absurd aspect of a pop star’s life;
- The worship of a pop star by an ordinary teen (posters peeling off a crowded bedroom wall etc);
- Religious icons – relevance in a modern world;
- Someone using icons to communicate;
- The lie of the icon: a pop star with a public image that is nothing like they really are;
- Sex symbols: the disparity between ‘real’ bodies and those portrayed in magazines…
- An obsessed fan’s memorabilia collection relating to a particular famous person;
- Objects related to something negative that you don’t want to remember: i.e. a night out on the town (cigarette butts, empty beer bottles);
- Memorabilia related to a famous wedding (i.e. Prince Charlies and Diana);
- A collection of tacky plastic characters from a particular film, that lie forgotten and dusty in the bottom of a box;
- War memorabilia, interspersed with photographs.
- Note: See some of the comments below for more ideas related to this Art exam topic.
- ‘Sleazy’ signs from a dodgy part of town…with litter / other traces of human life / dark alleyways underneath;
- A inner cityscape crowded with brightly lit signs – perhaps exploring things to do with the clutter of human life / overpopulation of space etc;
- An decrepit sign (on an entertainment park or tired motel, for example) with broken bulbs / peeling paint;
- Disassembling old neon signs and reassembling different signs together in tongue-and-cheek ways;
- Inspiration drawn from the Neon Boneyard – where old neon signs go to die (part of the Neon Museum);
- Focusing on the eye-catching aspect of neon colour to draw attention to unexpected subjects…
- Young children playing with toys;
- A family playing a card or board game;
- Playing in water – or at the beach, with a bucket and spade in the sand;
- Sports – competitive playing;
- ‘Playing the field’;
- Dress up games;
- A young child putting up make-up in the mirror (playing at the imitation of adults);
- Wendy houses;
- An early childhood education scene;
- Playing gone wrong: an injured child / fighting children etc…
- Origami;
- Paper aeroplanes (see Christina Empedocles and Ali Page)
- Paper bags (see the painting below by Karen Appleton)
- Architectural models;
- Folding architectural structures;
- Tents;
- Beach chairs;
- Weaving.
- A physical journey from a particular destination to another (i.e. the mundane drive between your home and school…seeing beauty in the ordinary etc; your first visit to see something that moved you);
- The transformational journey from old to new (old structure demolished for something new / old technology making way for new etc);
- A journey through time, such as a person aging / physical changes, or a record of memorable occasions in a life;
- Childhood to adulthood;
- Getting through an emotional circumstance, such as a loved one passing away or overcoming illness;
- Conception/pregnancy/birth;
- A miniature journey (i.e. walking down your garden path – with viewpoint at your feet etc; brushing your teeth in the morning – the journey from arrival at the sink to bright white smile);
- Achieving a goal;
- An academic journey – through school etc (ambition / academic goals / failure / success / test papers / assignments / grades etc…as in the hurdles you need to get to university);
- On a bus or a plane or a train;
- Memorabilia related to a particular journey (i.e. an overseas trip);
- A still life made from tickets, maps, timetables;
- The journey of an animal (i.e. a bird or fish, swimming upstream);
- The journey of an insect walking a short distance over interesting surfaces;
- Terrorism and the journey you will never forget.
- A family argument;
- Domesticated cat or other animal;
- Domestic chores – focus on a mundane ordinary task such as doing the dishes (see Sylvia Siddell and Jo Bradney);
- Housewives / the female role / feminism etc;
- Wild versus Domestic;
- The ‘perfect’ home situation illusion and what bubbles below the surface…
- Domestic versus foreign / invading / other;
- Domestic goods = items made in your own country…a still life featuring country-specific items…
- The merging of reality and our ‘online’ lives;
- The fictional online persona (the person we craft in our Facebook profiles and so on);
- iPods / digital devices and brightly lit screens;
- Cyber dating / online love;
- Brain waves and digital imaging of human brains while dreaming.
- Windows / frames – from unexpected locations / unexpected angles or in places where the outside scene contrasts the inside scene;
- Transparent layers / glass / distortion / interesting views through things;
- X-rays;
- Old overhead projector transparencies;
- Flicking through an old recipe book or photo album;
- Looking through small gaps between leaves in the foreground at a natural scene;
- Trains / tunnels;
- A child looking through cracks in a jetty at the water below;
- Invisibility, and the feeling you get when someone ‘looks through’ you – i.e. doesn’t notice you at all;
- Kids playing hide and seek, peeking out from a hiding place;
- Inappropriate snooping through someone else’s personal belongings…
- People engaged in ordinary mindless actions, i.e. brushing teeth, doing one’s hair, eating breakfast;
- Scars / tattoos / deformities that are out of the ordinary;
- The vices of ordinary people (cigarette smoking, alcoholism, food addiction etc);
- Portraits of really ‘plain’ people – seeing the beauty in the ordinary;
- The facades / layers people build up around themselves to make themselves seem extraordinary – make-up, fashion accessories etc;
- A person of extraordinary importance in your life (your mother or grandmother etc);
- Ordinary people who have extraordinary roles (i.e. a firefighter);
- The extraordinary;
- Merging images of people with other objects to make fantastical creatures;
- A portrait of an ordinary stereotype: the gossip or the cheerleader etc;
- The desperate attempts or lengths someone will go to become extraordinary;
- Depictions of ordinary people, so that they look eerie and extraordinary, like the awesome artworks by Loretta Lux;
- Sculptures of the ordinary, at extraordinary scales, like Ron Mueck (viewer discretion advised).
- A grandmother or other elderly person holding a baby;
- Meeting your childhood self or yourself fifty years in the future;
- Ancient man meeting the modern world: the conflict between genes and the modern environment;
- Ancient artefacts, alongside modern instruments;
- Discarded outdated computers / technology, to make way for new (things that become rapidly obsolete);
- Fresh fruit alongside rotted and decaying produce;
- Plastic surgery: an attempt to make old into new;
- A decaying structure alongside a new, contemporary form;
- New posters overlaid onto an outdoor wall layered with old, peeling posters;
- An old architectural form demolished for something new / old technology making way for new etc).
- The impact of digital technology on modern lives;
- Advances in preventative health and medicine;
- The prevalence of natural disasters in recent times;
- Terrorism;
- Time;
- The mechanics of an old clock;
- A topical issue, such as food addiction.
- Birth;
- Death;
- Train stations / Airports / Looking out windows at that which is left behind;
- Divorce / departure of a parent;
- Parents who leave their children;
- Recovering from a departure / coping mechanisms;
- First day at school (or some other place);
- Feet walking away;
- A decaying, decrepit building after the departure of the occupants;
- A look at building entrances and exits;
- Motorway exits;
- Maps / subway routes / directions for travellers…
- A freshly harvested outdoor setting;
- A farm-like scene with wooden crates / indoor wooden shed;
- Vegetables stored for animals;
- Vegetables hanging to dry, i.e. onions / garlic with tools leaning nearby;
- A kitchen scene;
- A fruit and vege shop;
- A bustling marketplace;
- Preserving fruit – knives / chopped fruit / preserves in glass jars;
- Fruit, veges and tools in an unexpected location, i.e. hanging in plastic bags;
- Abstract works derived from the patterns on the skin of fruit and vegetables or the interiors that have been sliced open with knifes;
- The brutal smashing of a watermelon or some other fruit or vegetable with a hammer;
- The hanging of decaying fruit and vegetables.
- Wedding traditions;
- Birthday celebrations;
- Religious rituals;
- Guy Fawkes;
- Christenings;
- Coming-of-age rituals;
- Graduation ceremonies.
These ideas were taken from HERE
Check out these links too:
-PHS AP Art
-Cathedral HS