artists - ideas

Todd McLellan

Todd McLellan’s interest in photography began at an early age with the encouragement of his father. After graduating in 2002 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alberta’s College of Art & Design, McLellan’s passion for photography brought him to Toronto where he is a member of the Sugino Studio team and specializes in automotive, commercial and conceptual work.

His interest in the creative field all stated from a kindergarten finger painting class, which his father encouraging him into the field of photography at an early age.

 The work of Todd McLellan is very clean, precise, bold in colour and clear to the point. His images do have an impressionistic feel to them but due to the plain single colour backgrounds, the focus is purposely only on the objects and so has a very clear meaning of what he wishes the audience to be looking at.  His images are so vivid in colour with flat perfectly formed shadows that they initially appear cartoony or digitally created. As his photographs usually end up in advertising they have a certain values to obtain in order for the intended audience to take interest. McClellan has managed to make if food look quite appealing as all his items are perfectly formed and the right colours they are expected to be. This is something i want to draw upon when photographing my own food items and create a comparison based on this. I really like the amount of detail he is able to bring out through his use of lighting. 

 

Todd McLellan's latest series "Disassembly" captures relics of our past in a unique, dismantled and exposed form. Disassembled items include a typewriter, a push lawn mower and a rotary phone. Each image has had every part meticulously re-arranged - by type, size and function - on a beige surface in an almost OCD-like manner, resulting in a portrait of an era now left behind.

 

I thought for my ideas, I could experiment with a similar style, by investigating quantity of meat that the average person consumes a year, which astounded me to be on average of 67lbs. Which is the equivalent us eating approximately 5 cows in a life time. I wanted to show this calculation through 5 modelled cows.

In one of Todd's newest projects, he disassembles various items such as a penax camera and a Suffolk lawnmower (among plenty of other things), rearranges the pieces into a neat presentation and then photographs them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the same time I came across Kleiner’s images, I also found the work of Marina Aurora. Her work is quite similar to Kleiner’s however Aurora’s was created a few years before hand. She uses the same technique of photographing from directly above using even lighting, however her images tell more of a story through the way there are actual meals laid out on the table, with floral table cloths, depicting the sort of people about to tuck into that meal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When looking at The Guardians online colour supplement I came across the work of Austin Radcliffe who has created a series entitled 'Things organised neatly' in which he has taken photographs of objects which he has arranged very formally and neatly and which depict his daily life and activities. This idea of setting things out in order to achieve perfection in appearance has been linked to the obsessive compulsive disorder in which sufferers have to do certain things in a particular way to achieve personal satisfaction and piece of mind.