Year 11 recreate Julian Opie's digital art

Year 11 students have been investigating the work of Julian Opie, an English contemporary sculptor and digital artist from Oxford who is perhaps best known for portraits that reduce subjects to essential lines and colour planes. Opie has created a stylized, fragmentary visual language that de-personalizes his subjects. Opie has produced several continuous animations on LCD screens, such as Christine Blinking (1999). It is this ‘blinking series’ our Year 11 students have been exploring. They focused on the subject of self-portraits and on learning how to manipulate digital platforms to develop their own continuous animations. The concept behind the work is that of showing only movements that would be present through the duration of sitting still for an artist. to ‘paint’ your portrait. Opie would record his 'sitters'/'models' in real time as they would move when they pose for a painting, capturing for example their blinking, sighing, slight movement of the hair or eyebrows. Students therefore recreated portraits that very move subtly.