Seven feelings – joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, dislike and liking.

Paul Ekman

Anger, distrust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise

Robert Plitchik

Joy and sadness, anger and fear, trust and distrust, surprise and anticipation

Basic emotions that emotions that are said to have evolved in response to the ecological challenges faced by our ancestors.

They are primitive and are said to be “hardwired” with each basic emotion relating to a distinct neurological circuit.

This means that we are hardwired to respond to certain situations with a basic emotion bases on our own ancestors.

Basic emotions are also referred to as “affect programs” and are known to be innate, universal, autopmatic and fast.

They trigger behaviors with a high survival rate. This is different to emotions such as nostalgia, which are developed later on, and are for example, not attributed to infants or animals.

My final project

Anger, shock, disappointed, Disheartened

I’ve decided I will interview one of my friends for some research. It’ll be a video interview with possibly two people reacting to a video that I have. I’m not sure when this interview will happen but after the interview has happened I need to make a survey about what people think about horse abuse.

For the interview i may book the studio but I wouldn’t mind it being outside with a more  presentable background, the video will be shown in the interview video as well so the viewer and interviewee can see the video.

we were introduced to Cueva de las Manos that is basically what cave men did to paint, its been relevant for over 13,000 years / since 700AC. They had no materials to do this so they just used earthy colours and a cave wall with their hands as a silhouette. We experimented with the natural colours  first, I just did black and a blood red-for my last one I wanted to express it with the colours from my final project piece trying to make it look as harsh as I could with my hand. The results were odd but i feel that ive got my message out. Later on we will be cutting out some stencils and using brusho again BUT with our own images so this time it will really looks a lot better.

Dressage – Bit Abuse

A quick definition of Rollkur. Is a hyper flexion of the horse’s neck being a practice in equestrianism defined as “flexion of the horse’s neck achieved through aggressive force” and is banned by the world governing body, the International Federation for Equestrian Sports. This is a huge problem in dressage, it is used outside of dressage but however is more common inside of dressage. There’s usually foam from the horse’s mouth attempting to open its mouth with a tight nose band. The rider’s hands go to loosen it slightly then go back. This is known as  “seesawing” the horse’s mouth, it does alot of damage to the horses cervical vertebrae and the mandible. To get the fancey affect in dressage, the neck is always unnaturally low, this causes pain. Almost like if a human had to sit up right with their head down for countless hours, it would start to hurt and would end up possibly hurting a muscle. In Dressage there’s the classical Kick > Pull > Whip > Buck. This only ever happens when the horse is extremely uncomfortable.

When doing dressage you need to look presentable. Most riders that that to the extreme and have the hassle of “bit abuse”, the bridle plays a huge part in this type of abuse. There are bridles that are bit free and perfectly fine for the horse to use without being pulled by the mouth. Not all bits are bad, its how you treat them. We all know the bit is the metal going through the horses mouth, this actually goes over the tongue that when unreasonable amounts  pressure is applied the tongue will most likely become weak and most times even split. However, extreme measures in dressage can lead to a horse having breathing problems with damage to the neck, throat and body. The body can become very sensitive if they are hit with a whip ( as most of them are ) I am not saying whips are bad no, they can be used to help teach a horse, but used in the wrong way with too much pressure can cause them to associate a whip as a bad thing.

 

Dancing.

Yes, seeing a horse dancing is beautiful but really, how some people teach horses how to dance you wouldn’t look at a dancing horse the same way again. The Pillar Method. A horse a tied between two pillars and gets whipped from behind to start trotting, nerveless it is held back by the halter or bit. Once the horse starts to learn to trot on the same spot when it sees a whip they’ll start hitting it on its front legs to get a better result. That way it’ll lift the legs higher to try and escape the pain but it wont be able to go anywhere but the same spot. Like The Lick Method, chains are often used around the horses legs, with the same affect the chains will hit its legs while moving that makes it moving its legs outwards. This is not necessary for a horse to dance, dancing is sometimes used in dressage as well. Along side the dancing they also have to get their head down to make it look more “elegant”. There are more natural way to get a horse a dance, yes it may take a long time, but its better knowing that the horse isn’t going through any physical pain when practising. Having chains, whips and pillars can come across triggering to the horse that has possibly been abused by this method as with any animal or human, if they’ve been abused with a particular piece they will do anything to follow the “rules”.

 

Just like dressage the same rules apply when performing. They may gather foam up at the mouth and start to drool, not because it’s fun but because it’s tongue has no where to go, it can’t swallow because of the bit in its mouth that blocks most of the way.

Today we did a work shop on on our final projects. Firstly we we did a diagram on the power we were doing. so for example i did power – equality, we just simple put whatever power we were doing and wrote what it was related to our FMP. We then did a more creative display that we drew our pieces and made it more fun ( especially for me ), we then proceeded to put them on menti. there were a bunch of helpful links on some of the slides, one we took a quiz on different colours and tiered to write down what colour our FMP would relate to.These were some colours that people put ( mines in the bottom left ). However, before we did this we took a test like i mentioned, the results came out the same for everyone.b My visual spread looked like this with both colours.

Later on this morning we did brusho, it was extremely fun to do  and really helped portray my message with only words and a single colour.

This mini project really helped me figure out what i needed to incorporate with my final project art wise, its made me think alot more with my front cover and images inside the book.

Just now we’ve been given a small task to help with our ‘power’ project. I got given the power of words and language. right in the room there’s some anti bullying posters that i have taken a picture of.

Final Project.

 

My first Initial idea was to do a magazine cover and a page all about animal abuse in the circus, I was going to use the story of tyke the elephant for the main example of it. I soon realised that the magazine would look like a long paragraph assignment, so I changed my mind. Ingrid and I sat down and talked about options, she said books are an option as well so I tried to think of an idea that can go with a children’s book. I had an idea to do the book in the style of Biff and Chip with lots of images with little to no text. That changed so I wanted to do the child’s book on Amnisa as my mum’s Nan had it and she knows a lot about it and how to handle it. I decided that it would be hard to make a visual representation of the condition for a child to understand. Yet again, I was stuck blank about what to do. I follow a page in on Instagram about horses and her horse journey in particular. As I’ve loved horses more or less my whole life I decided I would do it about the pain behind what we see horses do, aka horse abuse in dead sight. This will still be a book but not a children’s book, more of a book about facts, there will still be images and the main factual reasoning’s. I have a feeling this will be long and take a lot of time to do so I need to start working on it asap.

Title ideas.

• Pain behind the beauty
• Butterfly effect
• Beast behind the beauty
• Beauty’s pleasures
• Abuse in sight.

I am yet to pick a title as I really want it to fit what I’m doing, before I start illustrating and all the fun stuff I need to do my research and that consists of…

• The high lick
• Dressage
• How they really get horses to dance
• Safer ways to do these
• How to help and notice
• How this abuse causes horses to not be wanted?
• Simply do a little doodle for each and every one.

Research comes first, Art comes last.

The High Lick

The high lick is a method some trainers use on Tennessee Walking Horse in competitions to win the medal. This is a horse mostly known for entering competitions for how gracefully they can walk / trot etc. This is called the high lick method as trainers usually put platforms on the horse’s front hooves. They abuse the horses to get the results they want (and exaggerated kick), this is mostly known as soring. Soring involves the application caustic chemicals including oil of mustard, Carton oil, diesel fuel and other irritants that are applied to the pasterns or ankles of the horse’s feet and wrapped in bandages coated in more chemicals. These chemicals can cook their skin overnight. The horse’s also wear chains in the show ring, when training however they wear heavier chains, these chains when the horse is moving can cause it to all be sensitive and that’s what makes the horse move in a frantic movement. To hide the Scaring, they use human hair spray of the horse’s coat colour and spray over it. Even though this should be noticeable. The natural walk of the horse is beautiful enough. As the competitions are mostly about how beautiful the horses look as well as the execution of the horse’s performance is the main structure of the competition.

The natural looks of the walk compared to the High Lick is extremely noticeable, anyone should be able to see that. It doesn’t matter if it looks “beautiful” because it’s really not! How they naturally walk is beautiful enough, some of these horses are so worn out and are in no need of use so the owners put them up for sale or put them down, they’re used for our pleasure when its sick whoever likes this walk.

       —example photo.

Platforms: The Big lick is primarily achieved by putting the horse is ridiculous padded shoes that make them look like platforms. However, “padded” wasn’t the right word for it. Each layer of platform has nails that can apply pressure causing extreme pain and make every step painful. This wasn’t the only method used to get the horses to get the exaggerated movement.

Soring: Those pieces of equipment alone is enough for the horse to be in pain and get those movements, yet they wanted movement to be bigger. This is how soring is counted as one of the most harshest training methods as it can leave permanent scaring. they would sore the horses on the front legs only right down ear the hoof, the chemicals used are oil of mustard, Carton oil, diesel fuel and other irritants. These can all inflict pain to the horse making its thresh hold more exaggerated. In competitions they would also put chains around its front hooves where the soring would happen so every time it moved it would make the step even bigger than before. In training they would wrap around cloth covered in irritants. Nails, screws and thumb tacks into the limbs to make them even more sensitive. To cover up that they would be harming these horses they would use human hair spray and cover up the marks so it looks completely normal.

This “beautiful” movement is absolutely sick, no one is innocent. Not the owners, riders and definitely not the trainers nor people that work there as a assistant.

Recently The Big Lick may have its ends in the US. Stacks and chains go away on the 1st January 2018. it would take time for the abused horses to go back to their original state of walking but its possibly. Nerveless that The Big Lick is banned in the US that wont stop people from doing it still and all around the country. Now that people should be aware of the signs of abuse in the Tennessee Walking horse (TWH), it’ll be a lot more easier to help and put an end to this abuse for good.

My first Initial idea was to do a magazine cover and a page all about animal abuse in the circus, I was going to use the story of tyke the elephant for the main example of it. I soon realized that the magazine would look like a long paragraph assignment, so I changed my mind. Ingrid and I sat down and talked about options, she said books are an option as well so I tried to think of an idea that can go with a children’s book. I had an idea to do the book in the style of Biff and Chip with lots of images with little to no text. That changed so I wanted to do the child’s book on Amnisa as my mum’s nan had it and she knows a lot about it and how to handle it. I decided that it would be hard to make a visual representation of the condition for a child to understand. Yet again, I was stuck blank about what to do. I follow a page in on Instagram about horses and her horse journey in particular. As I’ve loved horses more or less my whole life I decided I would do it about the pain behind what we see horses do, aka horse abuse in dead sight. This will still be a book but not a children’s book, more of a book about facts, there will still be images and the main factual reasoning’s. I have a feeling this will be long and take a lot of time to do so I need to start working on it asap.

 

Title ideas.

• Pain behind the beauty
• Butterfly effect
• Beast behind the beauty
• Beauty’s pleasures
• Abuse in sight.

I am yet to pick a title as I really want it to fit what I’m doing, before I start illustrating and all the fun stuff I need to do my research and that consists of…

• The high lick
• Dressage
• How they really get horses to dance
• Safer ways to do these
• How to help and notice
• How this abuse causes horses to not be wanted?
• Simply do a little doodle for each and every one.

Research comes first, Art comes last.

Titles narrowed down.

• Pain behind the beauty
• Abuse in sight

The theme we’ve been given is power, we went through a slide show Wednesday, I only managed to pick two types of power. Equality, this i can work a lot more with, and People in power, this will be a little more trickier to do. I could do the people actually riding the horses / trainers / owners as they’re in power, i can also put what the government / people can do to help. The title is one thing to worry about but I am still not sure what the cover should be.

Cover

• Dark background
• needs to be fitting ( sad, truthful etc )
• Bold title

Research

• chapters of the book will have the type of abuse.

Image in the book

• Have the cause of what is affecting the horse
• On the chapters i could do a how it should look.

My reference art credits go to @/ princess_lucygoosey on instagram, i asked for her consent to reference art of her horses some time ago, this has come in useful.

 

Mise- èn-scene

As my work is a book, it maybe a little hard to put Mise- èn-scene into it, but it is possible to do, I just need to really think on how to interpretative it  into the book.

Photography aspect.

• setting – The setting will be in a field / where horses usually are, I will mostly try and get the horses in action.
• Decor – this will look empty as i want it to just be the horse on its own mostly, I will be adding the skeletal features of the horse to show what damage it’s actually doing to the horse so it’ll be plain. The only part that’ll have detail is when there’s tack on the horse with a rider, that’ll be the minimum amount of decor.
• Lighting – The lighting will be fairly dark as the message I want to send a message that there’s more than it seems, this is really the whole focus on what i want to do.
• Depth of space –  There really wont be lot of this as It’ll mostly be one solid model and open space. However, I will need deep focus to make up for the lack of depth space.
• Costumes and Makeup – There will be no need for costumes of makeup as you need to wear particular gear when you go to a yard or even ride a horse for that matter.

In conclusion Mise- èn-scene is still essential for me, I will need to make sure i hit every box of this criteria.