Zoe James -Williams

Zoe James- Williams is a welsh artist living in Swansea on the Gower coast. Zoe is especially well known for her ballet and figurative paintings  she became the first artist in residence at Swansea Grand Theater in Sept 2009. She also teaches art class in the Ostreme centre ad Swansea.

Zoe’s pastels and watercolor paintings of ballerinas and dancers have proved to be very popular with a wide audience. She has been enchanted by the world of dance since she was a little girl. As an artist is drawn to the dancers exquisite beauty and grace gained through years of dedication and self discipline, as she aims to bring out these qualities in her work.

One of her favorite subjects to paint and draw is the ballerina. ‘‘A ballerina masks her strength with beauty, yet undeniably it is still there.’ - says Zoe! ‘’When you see them rehearse day after day, striving for perfection, this quote is so true. It is this powerful combination that seems to embody the women who I try to capture.’’

Zoe’s Techniques:

Zoe likes to portray the female figure in its own intimate world, as if you are looking through a keyhole into a private moment. Their enigmatic quality is accentuated by her use of a limited palette, usually in watercolor or pastel, so as to concentrate on the drama of light and shade to create a dramatic and striking image. she uses classic costumes or white muslin for draping to give her pictures a timeless quality as well as focusing on the line of the body.

Zoe experiments a lot with watercolour, pen, pastel and oils. She also uses different colored pastel papers. she particularly like using red for the drama. she thinks that probably comes from influences of Asian art with their strong colour and line.

Influences

Zoe’s artistic influences include Degas and Toulouse Lautrec with their wonderful use of pastel and their talent in capturing the unguarded moments of their subjects. She  also look to Dame Laura Knight, the first female to become a full member of The Royal Academy. She painted a variety of subjects, including life in the theatre, and her backstage drawings and paintings really capture the atmosphere of life behind the scenes.

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas (19^th July, 1834-Sep 27, 1917) is a French painter and sculptor. Degas was known for his canvases depicting ballerinas, theatre patrons, and Parisian labourers. Intellectual creativity led Degas to work with many unusual techniques. Degas is also often identified as an Impressionist. Impressionism originated in the 1860s and 1870s and grew. The Impressionists painted the realities of the world around them using bright, "dazzling" colours, concentrating primarily on the effects of light, and hoping to infuse their scenes with immediacy.

Ballet dancers

One of Degas' favourite subjects was the ballet dancer. He loved to paint the dancers practicing in rehearsals or backstage before a show. He wanted to capture their energy and grace, but also their hard work and effort. During his career he created more than a thousand pictures of dancers. 

His Techniques:

Edgar Degas preferred various media (mixed media) throughout his artistic life, yet he often combined several different media on one canvas to give the work dimension and depth. Pastels, oil paints, gouache, and other materials can be found mingling together on the canvas in several of Degas' paintings, including "Dancers Practicing at the Barre" (1877) and "The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage" (1874). Each medium had a very particular application. Thinner, lighter media like watercolour would blur the lines of different objects while bold materials like charcoal would create the original sketch of the eventual painting.

Hatching was the next  technique degas used in his art works, By placing a series of long, undulating lines in alternating colours next to each other, Degas managed to give vibrancy and energy to even the most commonplace subject matter. Hatching and cross-hatching are most often found in Degas' pastel works, both wet painted pastels and dry chalked pastels.

When creating monotypes, an artist smears paint on a flat surface, etches an image into the paint and presses the flat surface on to a canvas, imprinting the canvas with the etched image. Degas tweaked the monotype process by painting the surface, then using brushes to create the imagery he sought, forgoing the typical etching process.

Impasto was another technique degas used in his work. Impasto is the technique of applying paint in thick, striking layers. Brushstrokes are clearly visible, and the image is slightly raised from the canvas. Often Degas would combine pastels or oil paints with binding agents that would create a thick, paste-like paint that Degas would spread around the canvas. Impasto can clearly be seen in Degas' 1857 "Self Portrait," especially around the edges of Degas' smock and kerchief.

The history of Alphabets

The history of the alphabet begins in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Both writing systems were developed independently, and they are very different from each other. This alphabet was invented to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt and was at least influenced by the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieratic script. The most widely used alphabet today is the Latin alphabet.^] It derives from the Greek, the first true alphabet in that it consistently assigns letters to both consonants and vowels.

It is from the Greeks that we get our name for the word “alphabet.” It comes from the first two letters of their alphabet, Alpha and Beta. These names actually came from the Phoenicians; however, whose first two letters were ‘Aleph and Beth.

Scholars are not quite sure when the Greeks first came into contact with the Phoenician alphabet; however it seems to have been about 1000 BC. They changed the alphabet some, both the look of the symbols as well as adding some symbols of their own. For example their alphabet had an F character, unlike the Phoenicians, although it originally stood for the “w” sound.” Because different languages use different sounds, the need to create new letters was common as the alphabet was distributed.

The Greeks were the first to introduce vowels into the alphabet. While the Phoenicians did have the letter “aleph” which became “alpha,” it originally represented a gutteral tone, rather than what we consider the letter “a.” Within Greece there were many different alphabets, most of them had about 25 letters and were mostly similar, with some slight differences.