- work from two material projects
- skills gained in TD sessions
- development of 1st subject final outcome: clay painting
- development of 2nd subject final outcome: imovie Love
- work from collaborative field project
- artwork I saw on London trip
- concepts I got from Big Question
- artworks influencing my 1st subject final piece: clay painting
- books influencing my 2nd subject final piece: imovie Love
- concept I got from constellation
Month: May 2016
Concepts I got from Big Question
The Big Question lecture that I enjoyed the most was about devotional images. I was initially intrigued by Jon’s idea of historical time which happened in the past and his idea of spiritual time which is eternally, always, continually happening in the now. By getting a hold of these concepts about time I saw how my video footage could be influenced. For example, to express historical time or a memory of something that happened in the past, I can combine archive video material from another time and break it up with my own video material in the same place but of the present, like a dog or a suitcase or a speaker or darkness. Also, I was interested in the idea of the predella, from late medieval times where the base of an altarpiece has small-scale narrative art supporting the main panel of art above. This appealed to me. I like the idea of the main scene being given a clearer view and a fuller picture by the mini paintings or sculptures at its base. It was a clever concept, because only by kneeling before the painting, in effect praying to God, could the viewer see the little images at the base of the piece. I started to sketch my own altarpiece for my inside outside project with the main picture being Cezanne’s still-life painting of apples and oranges, and then the smaller ones of orchards. There is a relationship in the predella design between large and small, where the viewer moves out to see the larger inside piece and moves in to focus on the small outside pieces. This influenced my ideas about my own practice and the possibility of artwork on connected panels of board (like a triptych) that opens and closes, that has paintings inside, and outside on the panel doors. I started to think about video again, but now as an act of painting too, in the sense that it can start off for example, as an orange in black and white, then transform into cut orange slices in colour. It is like a drawing in pencil which then has colour added to it by manipulating it (cutting the orange open). I like new ideas about videoing because film techniques are new to my experience and I want to experiment and incorporate new ideas to see who I am as an artist and what I do and don’t believe. I found the concepts in this lecture about the devotional image stimulating. It also made me question when art is Christian : is it by its subject or because the artist believes or does it become Christian by being in a church? I also found it fascinating to think about how art today can be a continuation of church space by the frame design or church spire idea. All these concepts which revolve around the devotional image are influencing my practice by making me think through what on earth Christian art is in this day and age and what it actually means. Christian art seemed to be so dominant during the Renaissance period especially. It has made me think about anot artist getting a commission from a church today – what would it be or how would an artist go about it? These are the new ideas and challenges that this lecture has thrown into my art practice.
Concept I got from constellation
The concept in constellation seminars that was most influential in my practice was metaphors because I compared fruit to people in my final pieces for inside and outside. I am saying an apple is a person and an orange has feelings in my imovie and in my clay painting. I learnt about metaphors in seminar two of Visual Thinking, the constellation option with Clive Cazeaux. Metaphors are not lies because everyone knows they are not true, but what lies behind a metaphor is the users intention to emphasise how things are or generate insight into the reality of what it refers to. I am excited about this because it is relevant to my use of metaphors in my imovie where I am exploring how marriage and divorce happens and trying to illuminate the whys and wherefores using the visual metaphor of fruit. This creates a humorous slant to the movie but because it is a dark subject, the imovie almost slides into black comedy. However, I am not making light of the issues so it is saved from true dark comedy. Using visual metaphors in my practice also makes my artwork more meaningful by equating it with something else. Metaphors are common in everyday language, in communication, in high school English lessons. They are a creative way to speak, and create picture thoughts. In my practice it means I start looking at things differently and this is powerful. It helps in constructing new ideas and unusual work in my artwork. Visual metaphors like making fruit an actor on a stage, or a person in a relationship, means as an artist I can express thoughts that I might not otherwise express. The audience creates metaphors by relating the art work to their own life or giving it verbal meaning when in reality it is just a lump of material: clay or canvas and paint. This is how meaning is generated in art. These are ways in which metaphors influence my practice. In one sense all art is metaphors, saying it is one thing when it is not, especially trompe loeil and illusions. Banksy’s artwork could be metaphorical because it says somethings we know is untrue but makes a point about something else. This is why I aspire to metaphorical art in my practice. It gives my work more weight.
Library books influencing imovie Love
In the play As You Like It, there is a scene VII where Shakespeare writes:
These two sentences in the play influenced my imovie script initially because it gave me the idea of seeing apples and oranges as actors in a play and in this way I could take my artwork to a conceptual level, as well as have the visual level of the inside and outside colours and textures. My imovie was also influenced by a book I found in the library called
It gave me starting points for sketches by focusing mostly on apples throughout the book and taking me on a journey through drawing in regards to line, shape, volume, light, time, space, structure, chance, concentration and synthesis. It provides so many practical example of which I have explored several and made notes for future use. I am really excited about following these suggestions in future sketchbooks . I learnt techniques of question answer system to get new ideas and ones I am interested in. I learnt about how to use a sketchbook effectively to explore a topic. These are the ways this second book influenced my imovie script.
Artwork influencing my clay painting
Cezanne’s still life paintings of oranges and apples are profoundly influential in this piece of work. One of his still lifes is in the Musee d’Orsay in France, and another in the Getty Museum in LA in America which I am keen to visit if I ever have the opportunity. I have had to make do with looking at copies in library books. Most of these Cezanne paintings of fruit are in private collections (David Bowie and Saatchi) so I would have to wait for exhibitions to see them firsthand. I feel that the outline of Cezanne’s cloth is like a landscape I can sculpt. It stands out as if it can be touched, as if it should be 3d. I also like his subject matter of ordinary fruit because it involves varied shapes, a field of colours and specific compositions that make the fruit relate to each other by their positions. This appeals to me. I appreciate the fact that apples can symbolise other things such as Eve’s sin or Paris’s judgement of beauty, and by using fruit I wanted to place metaphorical meaning into my own work. I wanted to make my fruit appear as actors, some coming on stage, and others exiting it, in line with Shakespeare’s metaphor about this. Cezanne’s still lifes are a piece of everyday reality that give me a new way of looking at ordinary apples and oranges.. I wanted my piece to have a visual 3d effect like Cezannes does, as well as a conceptual level of meaning, namely the inside and outside of marriage and divorce. I have read some debates online and in essays about the meaning of Cezanne’s apples and oranges which he painted over and over for 30 years, and also about whether their is no meaning to them at all. I have created a wooden board with apple and orange shapes glued on which I hope to paint as a result of my interaction with Cezanne’s still lifes but I want to develop it in a pop inspired style, like Patrick Caulfield. This is how Cezanne’s artwork has influenced my inside outside final piece, and also further development.
Artwork I saw on the London trip
At the Tate Britain I saw real David Hockney paintings… there were 3 double portraits, huge canvases. I stood in front of each a long time. I wanted to absorb them and find out what I liked so much about his work. In retrospect, I think his portraits are unusual compositions. He takes odd sections of places. I was shocked to find out they were so large as I had only ever seen his work in library books. The absolute highlight of the day for me however was coming across his Big Splash. It is so beautiful and totally me with geometric almost sculptural basic shapes and then vibrant colours. I could see the unusual brush marks he used up close which was fabulous to experience. I like his style, his simple shapes and his happy colours. The social issues of homosexuality seem to run undercurrent to these works. This firsthand view of his work has influenced my practice by causing me to look for library books about him, and I have started reading them and hope to experiment with his style. He seems to have an interest in the eye and how it sees, which is what my 2500 word essay was on for constellation so I am also interested in finding out his views on looking. I have a lot of YouTube clips to listen to with him talking. Seeing his work has inspired me to investigate further his process and outcomes. I am excited to be learning from this great artist!
Work from collaborative field project
Working in a small group with other fine art students was interesting. We were definitely on the same wave length, and together created a huge cave art mural of sea life and the rubbish people throw into it. We also created a short video explaining this mural. Working with art students from graphics, textiles and maker was a different experience because although we all decided on creating a book, the pages reflect the groups different interests…painting, fabric, typeface and words, collage of materials. I experimented with a new material (plastic bottles) and process (cutting with zigzag scissors, burning with a cigarette lighter) to make jellyfish fish. In a tutorial Stephan suggested I persevere with this material, and this is how I improved the initial idea. I watched Avatar to see the jellyfish and underwater sea effect with the messiah soldier. I also went to the Bristol Aquarium to see the jellyfish and other sealife there, which was helpful. As a group, we discussed a general manifesto about sustainability in one word: FOREVER. I produced my own manifesto for sea conservation issues in Cardigan Bay in the format of a dialogue about the plight of the dolphins and the plight of the scallop dredger. This informed my final piece. I took photos and videoed the Bay on a day trip. I then edited the footage using premierre pro, and bound the photos to create a book. I was motivated to read some relevant books on the sea issues and watched a relevant dvd. Then I made three concertina books with TD Tom’s help and did research on ideas for page inserts, pop-ups and new constructions relevant to sea conservation. I did sketches to illustrate the books, and found books about the sea in the toddler section of the city library from which I experimentally painted 50 sea and sealife pages in various styles. I made a list of my favourite illustrators for future reference: Lauren Tobia, Mairi Hedderwick and Quentin Blake. I watched movies about underwater sealife and traced them on plastic sheets using a marker. I enlarged these on the photocopier and cut out stencils to spraypaint on installation boxes. I also spraypainted stencils on squares of the angling times newspaper and fishing/ boat magazines into my books. This together with the shower curtain on the installation boxes are to explain the dichotomy , tension, push and pull argument between the dolphins and the dredgers. The shower is a daily ritual that represents the dredger draining away the sealife in his day to day work.
Development of imovie Love
To display the colour and texture inside and outside of apples and oranges, I composed and took hundreds of different shots. I photocopied the best ones. I tried doing some A4 size 2d paintings of these photos but it didn’t feel right. In a tutorial, Chris Short suggested a video showing the action of exposing the inside of apples and oranges. I took video footage of cutting, slicing, peeling and hammering fruit and edited it on Premiere Pro. I wanted it to be more relevant to human life. I read about artists taking the risk of combining unrelated objects, in a field set book called Creativity: the psychology of discovery and invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihaliyi, so I started to sketch apples and oranges with mini objects from my daily life : earphones, house keys, toy car, a stress ball. I put some objects inside the fruit and some outside the fruit. I did some research online about cutting apples and oranges in different ways. I met people who were not enjoying their divorce and I started to put together a visual script exploring the inside and outside of love : about how or why marriage and divorce may happen. I used the fruit as characters in the narrative simultaneously showing the inside and outside of apples and oranges and their colour and texture. I took photos in the studio of the painted sketches I had made. TD, Neil Pedder told me about the old filmstrips you could cut up and paste back together in the old days. I printed the photos on a contact sheet format and cut them up to create a storyboard that looked like an old fashioned film strip. I felt this gave me the freedom to cut and paste if I wanted to change the story. I attended an imovie workshop with Matt and put together these still images with captions and sound effects to create a 12 minute movie.
This imovie operates on a visual level by exploring the colour and texture of the inside and outside of apples and oranges. It also operates on a conceptual level by exploring the inside and outside of relationships like marriage and divorce. Black humour looks at sad situations and touches on serious issues in a humorous way. I don’t intentionally make light of them. There is supposed to be a tension between the heart -rending pop songs on the one hand and the fruit images and light jingles on the other. This hopefully adds to the different layers of meaning!
Development of clay painting
I read some essays online about Cezanne’s still lifes. The apple was to him equivalent to a human figure: the form, colours, compositions, draperies. I had a tutorial with Claire Curneen about making clay apples. I wanted to position them to tell a story by their shape, colour, texture. She said look at still life through the prism of a sculptural oil painting. I learnt about metaphors in a constellation seminar and started to see the apples and oranges in Cezanne’s paintings in the light of Shakespeare’s metaphor: All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances. I had a tutorial with Stephan and he suggedted I do a mouldmaking workshop. I made an apple and an orange, and fired and glazed it. The result was ornamental, and not what I was looking for. I began to realize I wanted to take Cezanne’s still life out of the frame, out of 2d and put it into 3d because I think sculpturally. I went back to Cezanne’s roots in the painting. I composed a group of apples and oranges with a glass bottle on a white cloth like one of Cezanne’s paintings and drew it and took photos of it. I also sculpted it in clay, trying to create a stage out of the cloth, and actors in a play by the positions and form of the fruit. I fired it, and painted it with acrylics at the front to expose the outside everyone sees and recognizes but the inside behind the scenes I left as clay so it is like an actor with a mask.
mouldmaking an orange in a slipcasting workshop
Skills gained in TD sessions
I was inducted into various film techniques, namely getting video footage and editing it on Premiere Pro at a beginners level, as well as camera work in the studio for still images and creating an imovie with captions and sound. I also learnt how to burn these onto dvds and put them on YouTube. I used premiere pro three times, and imovie once, as well as using the video three times and composing hundreds of photos in the studio over the course of the year. I have found it exciting to learn from success and from mistakes. I would like to keep going in understanding these techniques at an intermediate level next. I like the way the images in photos and film can tell a narrative or create a dialogue!
I also learnt about screenprinting from TDs and created eight designs of the inside and outside of oranges and apples to screenprint. I have printed two designs so far on paper and one on calico fabric. With the idea of experimenting with collages on my screenprints to create the colour and texture of the inside and outside of apples and oranges, I have also learnt to create colour and texture inside an apple shape using a sewing machine and the applique technique, and explored the process of heat transfer using my screenprint designs. These skills have all been interesting to learn and in the long term also mean that I have more options when I think of creating an art piece now.
Ruth Newell 