The artists and their methods of production

Patricia Piccinini's "The Young Family"

Piccinini's sculpture entitled "The Young Family" is an artwork which depicts the changing relationship between what is natural and what is artificial. Upon looking at pictures of the piece, it seems to me as though Piccinini would have used leather, hair, and synthetic materials to create her sculpture. I would imagine she would have sculpted the piece using a different material to the ones we see on the surface to make the actual shapes and then covered them in leather and hair. Piccinini's piece exhibits a lot of very precise detail; the human forms within it are incredibly accurate, and would have required careful and detailed sculpting to achieve.

Sidney Nolan's "Kelly and His Armour"

Nolan's painting is one which centres around the theme of identity. He used oil and enamel paint on a composition board for this piece and employed a bland range of colours to convey the dark themes expressed by it. Nolan used very large, non-restricting brush strokes in his painting, using darker tones to outline the main shapes. Enlarging the picture, you are able to see some light brush strokes going horizontally across the naked man's body. I think this effect would have been created by simple brush strokes in a lighter colour across the painting. The manner in which it was painted and the colours used gives Nolan's piece a dark and sombre feel to it, reflecting the themes conveyed in the painting.