This afternoon Ms. Klingels came to Uni to give a talk on her work and life so far. I had been really excited about Izzie coming in to talk to us I had been a previous fan of her work and was intrigued to find out the thought process to specific pieces.
I'll tell you a bit about her shall I??
After graduating Chelsea school of Art, Izzie founded a company called 'Lazy Eye' working with film and video, creating and designing live shows and directing promos for bands including Death In Vegas and Beth Orton.
Izzie has and still is a main player in producing videos for TOPSHOP/TOPMAN nad Calvin Klein. Below is a film she made for TOPMAN called 'MAGIC BOX'. The film was made in place for a Catwalk show, as TOPMAN felt a catwalk show was too feminine. They created an environment to show the film in which you would stand in a room where the walls were made of screens and the film would be shown on the screens therefore surrounding you.
"Norman Mclaren was a great inspiration for this project" Izzie told us. You can tell by watching the film that Mclaren was an inspiration, specifically because of the stop-motion imagery used.
Another interesting Show Izzie created for long-term client TOPMAN was an Ice themed catwalk show. Along the edge of the runway was real ice and as a backdrop Izzie used a short film of a particuarly saturated sunrise. The inspiration behind this show was that of Len Lye (A Colour Box)...
and Work by Stan Brakhage...
(I particuarly enjoyed looking into Len Lye and Stan Brakhage's work as my Imaging work is based around their films! you know what they say....two birds!)
In 2001, Izzie co-founded a club called 'Hey Ladies' which was a club created for and by females. It was at this time that Izzie started to get into Illustration, she would Illustrate the fanzine they used to promote 'Hey Ladies'.
Behind the whole venture was an image, this image was Olympia by Manet in the 1860s. This was the first modern portrayal of a woman and at the time, people were appalled by it, they thought it was too sexual and confrontational. Nude women were usually either a kind of goddess or a representation of fertility or something of the sort, but this woman was obviously a prostitute.
What the founders of 'Hey Ladies' liked most about this image was the confidence the woman exudes. She stares straight at you like she has no shame or embarrassment. An interesting fact about this painting is that the model in the painting was a painter in her own right.
The great thing about creating a fanzine as a promotional tool is that people are able to read it easily, they can read it on the bus, at lunch or at any moment the have free. Izzie told us that 'Hey Ladies' shaped her style of illustration, made her choose to work with pen & ink, embracing colour, collage and digital media as her commercial commissions grew, and set her on her course. This played a big part in making her the illustrator she is today.
'Hey Ladies' ended when everyone who ran it became busy with other projects, but ran a workshop at the V&A as a final goodbye to the company.
After discovering her new found love for illustration, Izzie started focusing her attention on it more.
Here are some of her wonderful illustrations...
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