Project 1 - final Crit and Presentation of work
Project 1 - final Crit and Presentation of work Wimbledon School of Foundation - Fine Art , 3D design students - project 1 - 30 October 2010
Foundation Studies in Art and Design 2010 - 2011
Pathway: Fine Art Painting / Photography Part 1
Project Title: ‘Visionary Creatures’ THEMES:1. ABSENCE AND PRESENCE 2.NEUROSIS, NIGHTMARES 3. VOYEURISM
Project Context:
This project brief looks at the way artists are visionary creatures. They often use a range of diverse materials to explore themes within their vision to convey and orchestrate potential meanings.
Visions can be ancient, poetic, mythical, symbolic, abstracted, have a sense of ‘déjà vu’. The expanded field of “Painting” can use multiple perspectives, vivid swathes of colour, vagueness and blurring, skewed or distorted gestures.
In a series ranging from the everyday to strange-looking interior depictions, Albert Oehlen develops a new procedure by mixing photography and painting in order to break up the limits of these media and their ethics. He employs an iconoclastic repertoire from very different sources having been assembled by him over the course of many years. These photographs and photographic segments are glued directly on the canvas and are integrated by the artist's large-scale brushwork. Here, the process of gluing refers not only to a basic availability of picture models, but it also represents by its deliberate unprofessionalism and by the cheeky shortage of the painterly translation a criticism of the traditional purity rule within painting. The contrast of the material on the picture surface with the unity of the presented motif endows the pictures with their specific tension.
lights are being rigged, props are being positioned and actors are taking their places. It looks like a movie, sounds like a movie and smells like a movie, but it isn't. All of this activity is to make a single photograph, by Gregory Crewdson.
"I work with a production crew that all come out of film. We work with cinematic lighting but we are only after creating one single perfect moment." (Gregory Crewdson, photographer)
Michael Raedecker's paintings play a game of taking out and leaving in. On the one hand they are empty, almost schematic images created from just a few lines, a few visual fragments. On the other hand they have something archetypical, almost familiar about them. One way Raedecker achieves this effect is by building his images out of very carefully executed details, contrary to the apparent schematic character of the work. His paintings are also characterised by an unusual use of materials: threads and embroidery in combination with very thinly applied paint or paint 'poured out' in thick globs. Finally, Raedecker's extraordinary use of colour - cool greys, icy blues and dull green tints, colours you'd sooner expect to see in Scandinavian landscapes turns it all into a unique, individual painting style. Recent works such as kismet and mirage show a freer pictorial language. It's a pictorial language in which he not only makes use of cinematic images but just as easily uses computer manipulated images that we know from advertisements and other media without losing sight of his search for pure painting.
Anselm Kiefer’s particular stance relates to history. Mythological figures, named landscapes, historical characters, actual events.
“The symbol of fire as a sign of remembrance is central to the work, because a fire freezes the moment that a house or objects were previously in. The Holocaust is by far the most direct relationship, his use of mixed media (straw, tar) can be seen as a material to heal wounds, reunify, and mark remembrance”
Kiefer’s cities are seen through a veil of sand, and swirling constellations are created by clouds of sunflower seeds.
John Martin specialized in the apocalyptic, judgement pictures. He redefined romantic landscape painting. His work has a very strong sense of the Sublime, encouraging us to believe we can scale the highest mountains reach the stars, become infinite.
Gerhard Richter : www.gerhard-richter.com/art/ uses photography as a liberating vehicle. Richter’s photo paintings have a quality of the snapshot combined with a powerful documentary feel. Doubt and ambiguity undermine and enhance the viewers
Perception. Richter uses the ghost of one image over another, revealing and concealing the forms.
Thomas Demand is best known for his unique approach to photography. He makes images of rooms and other spaces that initially look real but are, in fact, photographs of three-dimensional models, mostly life sized, painstakingly constructed entirely from coloured paper and cardboard.
At first sight, the subjects represented in Demand’s photographs seem commonplace and familiar, but often they relate to scenes of cultural or political relevance, which have come to our attention through the mass media. They range from the archives of German filmmaker and National Socialist propagandist Leni Riefenstahl to the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway in Tikrit, Iraq.
Close inspection of Demand’s life-like images reveal a lack of detail and, as a result, the artifice of his scenes become apparent. His art reconsiders the traditional notion of photography as a faithful record of reality, highlighting the evasiveness of the medium in a world that is saturated with manipulated or mediated images. (Serpentine Gallery)
Inka Essenhigh appropriates Sci- fi movies, cartoons, classical frescoes. She makes mythological grotesque dreamscapes. Her use of smooth creamy seamless paint gives both a comic and heroic quality. Inka Essenhigh's work flits between abstraction and representation; her suggestive forms morph composure of design with quiescent sexual intrigue. Her paintings exude an energy from within: the liquid properties of her media convey an inherent, voyeuristic sensuality. Plastic tones and organic shapes are applied in thin, skin-like layers to create the effect of animation cells, seductive in their self-contained intricacy and precious quality. Her more recent paintings, rendered in oil paint, suggest the detached perfection of 3D animation or virtual reality. The cool gloss effect of her surfaces creates a sense of hyper-artificiality: her paintings offer a baroque beauty that is majestically antiseptic.
Kristin Baker is fascinated by the connection between painting and automobile racing, particularly by the contrast between accident versus control that characterizes both pursuits. She sees the racetrack as a contemporary version of the Roman coliseum, where the spectators of all social classes converge to watch the expert drivers steer their enormously expensive cars, covered with advertising, into spectacular crashes. Like the racetrack, her painting is a study in organization versus chaos. At the track, speed is both controlled and pushed to extremes. Her painting is also a study of how far to push to the extreme, how close one can get to overstimulation without an aesthetic crash. (Saatchi gallery)
Nan Goldin uses big themes: sex, death and religion. Each photo she takes has a powerful memorial quality. The autobiography suggested in the work is critical. Nan can appear in her photos beaten up or dancing, swimming or having sex. Her ‘Ballad of sexual Dependency’ gives us a vision of our most intimate moment’s, the images are emotional close-ups of gender politics.
Project Description:
The idea of this project is to make a series of works that make visual a vision you have had. You must bring with you an object , a photograph, and a gesture that represents the vision for you. It could be a moment ,it may be a longer period, it could be real, it could be fictional. Use your objects in a real manner and as triggers that activate your drawing. Develop these images into signs, powerful emblems, sensations. You may wish to work with materials which are transient, or you may wish to capture your moment with solid permanent materials, halting or freezing time, or reflecting time back. You might consider a Multi – faceted view of the metropolis ( see Kristin Baker) where we are addressing ecological issues, political or social visions. Your vision might take place on a journey, in a squat, at festivals, bizarre balls or hotel bars.
Use drawing/ painterly techniques to explore and (transform / elevate) your photographic source, organic or found forms. Consider how we “read” the signs and symbols in our lives. Do we feel safe or threatened by the future. Why do we collect found objects and memorabilia? What can these tell us about our existence?How do artists use found objects and memorabilia to create new narratives and fictions? What draws us to remember particular people and spaces?
Think about your techniques and objects and the approach you could use to convey them: (Words)
Haphazard -
Detritus
Barely visible
Grids, bands, borders
Dispersion
Microscopic
Scribbles
Transparency
Monochrome
Throwaway
Hard edged
Immersion
Fluid
Reductive
Translucent
Masked
Scratched
Rubbed
Drawing/ Painting/ Photography
Teaching methods
Lecture, pair/group work, individual tutorial, practical work, demonstrations, visits, contextual response
Drawing
Make 5 black and white drawings on day 1.
Explore mark making through a range of tools (i.e. cotton buds), develop mark making ,sloppy loose marks, to vigorous concentrated sensations. Use mixed media - (creating) , layered, dense, powerful, ,monumental, or delicate forms. Look at forms very closely, draw parts, enlarge scale. Be experimental, think about emotion, experience and feeling. Explore questions associated with drawing, such as anecdotal and narrative potential. Think about the use of drawing and text to conjure up thoughts and feelings.
Explore elegant spatial drawing which uses the imagination and the real. Develop a sense of abstraction,veiled drawings, ambiguous forms, investigate shallow, and deep space. Push your sense of colour, composition, and risk.
Painting
Use a wide selection of materials and methods of application to continue ideas and processes I.E. silver felt tip on black gesso, ink and coloured pencil on cigarette paper, charcoal and acrylic, latex and coloured ink, water-based paint on digital image, collage and enamel etc., in any combination. Experiment with unusual, but relevant, methods of application, such as painting with sticks, rags, card, pouring, squeezing. Lay out a palette , develop mixing and application, use thinning and thickening agents, research all possible methods of priming.
Photography Use painterly techniques to explore and transform elevate photographic source images into cryptic signs, and powerful emblems can be a useful way of gathering information and developing ideas to be taken forward into other approaches. It is also a valid form through which your finished ideas can be presented. You do not need to have any technical knowledge in order to start exploring photography’s potential and experimental work can be carried out with compact digital cameras and mobile phones as well as traditional negative-based film cameras. Initial photographs can be developed further through scanning and the use of digital manipulation. They can also be combined in experimental ways with other media and can be drawn on, scratched into or re-formed as collages.
Make a final response
• A series of paintings – on Board, Canvas over board, stretched canvas, plastic or metal.
• A series of drawings – all scales and sizes.
• A series of Photographs either black and white, or digitally manipulated.
• A mixed media approach - using all the above.
Suggested Research:
Tate Britain
Turps Banana Magazine
Victoria Miro Gallery
The Approach Gallery
Serpentine Gallery
White Cube Gallery
Saatchi Gallery
Photographers Gallery
Frith street Gallery
Nettie Horn Gallery
Riflemaker Gallery
Art forum Magazine, Art Monthly Magazine, Modern Painters.
Atlantis Art Materials.
Fielders Art shop Wimbledon High st
Spectrum Art Materials Haydons Rd Wimbledon
Materials required:
Resource Requirements:
• A selected amount of objects with associative qualities (i.e.old photos, found objects, clothing, written articles, toys etc) - to form the basis for your work. Bring these with you on the first day of the project.
• Sketchbooks/Paper for drawing and collage: e.g. newspapers, brown paper, graph paper, greaseproof paper, wall paper, sand paper, tracing paper, etc.
• Dry and wet media for drawing i.e. shoe polish, coffee, wax, latex, chocolate, graphite, coloured pencils and pastels.
• A selection of brushes etc: household brushes, radiator, decorators, scrapers, artists brushes.
• Dry and wet media for painting i.e. Acrylic paint, watercolour, gouache, gloss paint, blackboard paint, enamel, emulsion, ink, nail varnish, food colouring, varnishes, sand, thread, acrylic mediums and gels.
• A selection of tapes for collage and construction: e.g. masking tape, brown tape, parcel tape, etc. collage and construction: e.g. card, plastic, hay, string ,cardboard, fabric, laminated paper.
• Workshop materials: canvas/ timber/metal/plaster/acrylic/
• Found objects and materials.
• Camera
This image, Project 1 - final Crit and Presentation of work, by UAL Follows & Noga is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
