My Honours project is about branding an artist, a painter, whose name is Benoist Chapel.

Benoist studied architecture in France then painting in Italy, he specialises in painting on porcelain, but also does oil painting and a special technique of ball-pen drawing. He teaches other kinds of painting (acrylic, watercolour) but uses those more often. His audience is composed mainly of retired ladies painting on porcelain and this is something I would like to try to help with broaden his audience.

Benoist taught me about art, I gained confidence and came to graphic design. It's pretty much thanks to him that I'm here and I've left the corporate life so today I'm trying to do something for/with him. At the time we used to call the painting studio "Le Paradis" because it was such a pleasant place. Sadly the house burnt in 2006 and a lot of things changed from then on

ART IS HUMAN EXPERIENCE

AESTHETICS & ART AS EXPERIENCE

Toile de Jouy flow chart which reflects what I am doing my own perception of Art philosophy research on Art attempt to reflect the studio experience via branding use traditional branding but also immersive branding and sensory branding

REFLECT THE STUDIO EXPERIENCE WITH BENOIST CHAPEL

attempt to empower Benoist's teaching with digital means all this to try and create an electronic aura.

TRADITIONAL BRANDING

IMMERSIVE /SENSORY BRANDING

EMPOWERMENT

DIGITAL

CREATE AN ELECTRONIC AURA

At the beginning of the project I started working on a new brand and its identity but I quickly realised that I should focus on the visual style before anything else, because it is going to determine the identity and the look and shape of everything I will work on. I've had the idea to, instead of simply displaying his artwork, composing with it and creating a style that is influenced by artistic currents we both like. The first one is the PreRaphaelites (some people will know the paintings of Hunt, Waterhouse, Rossetti, Millais, etc) because their artwork was hyper-realist for the epoch and they were contesting existing conventions - we're looking at female figures and details and colour and light But even more than the PreRaph I'm looking at Symbolism. There were many symbolist painters with different painting styles but most of them had in common to paint things 'not as they were' and imaginary things and characters.

The reason why I'm looking at Symbolism is that I think Benoist may be a Symbolist painter A lot of his artwork is about "The ghostly presence of beings and things", which sounds Symbolist to me.

What I want to do concretely for the visual style is use parts of his artwork (I've asked him to work on some new things for this, in oil and ball-pen), do some compositions and add to them using digital ornaments, to have this Symbolist style but also give them a Baroque feel, something a bit heavier and more modern. Those digital ornaments I won't create on the computer - I've started to digitise things, scanning them or taking pictures - here are a few examples of experiments. I've also tried a bit of video and some other things as experiments(see blog) I think that both the things on the screen and the promotional items I'll produce will have that sort of modern baroque touch as I can't wait to use glitter and feathers and other things!

from Matter to Pixels without losing the Touch?

I've been looking at existing styles and I'm also looking at Immersive Branding and Sensory Branding. Also, as a spontaneous follow-up to last year's module Digital Media Practice, I'm researching the theme of Digital vs Traditional, or rather Digital for Traditional, how the two may be combined for a different kind of branding. Not sure how much of all this will be in my final dissertation but these are subjects I'm very interested in for the project.

In anticipation of the electronic aura!