In regards to the brief set I was asked to create two
paintings one being representational and one being abstract. The set theme of
work behind the paintings is a ‘place’ this place could be my favourite place
in the world, a place that has some
meaning or memory to me or simply a place I had visited and took inspiration
from.
On the initial research for my abstract piece I took
inspiration from the artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose work stood out
to me because of his vibrant use of colour, the childlike naiveté technique of
his painting, the decorative style building’s in his painting, and the weird
and fantastical ideas of how to represent and depict normal daily scene’s like
a cluster of building’s. His paintings have a thick texture of rich colour
which shows me the sensuality of colour, this inspired me and gave me the idea
of how I can use colour to represent different emotions in my piece. My first
canvas depicts a place where I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years
learning the motions of different and difficult emotions and eventually growing
into a stronger person through experiences. This place is a house set in the
middle of a council estate area. The house does not show my own home, nor is it
a happy or sad memory for me, it’s a place that has a mixed bag of emotions.
The piece shows this difficult journey through my usage of colour, which was my
initial idea relating back to my research and inspiration of Hundertwasser. For
example when I was painting the house and trying to convey my emotion I used
brighter colours such as yellow for the exterior of the house however I use
dark/morbid colours on the windows of this house expressing the emotional pain
felt inside the interior and shell of the house. I believe this proved to be a
successful technique for me as it helped deliver emotion to the piece that I
was trying to convey. However on summary of this piece I believe I have used
both representational and abstract values within this piece. With abstract
qualities being my expressive use of vivid colour and my childlike painting
style depicting the houses and building’s. On the other hand I believe this
piece of work also has some representational value as I’ve painted this scene
from my memory and tried to include as much true detail and positioning/scale
of the place as possible.
My second piece is a representational piece of a photograph
I took of a landscape. This was simply a photograph of a sceane, that I
captured showing a colourful sunset and surrounding landscape. In my piece I
have represented all the colours of the sky through oil paint. Although this a
natural sunset the colours that exhibited in the photograph are complimentary
to one another such as yellow and blue along with the subtle reds. The first
third of the image is a dark almost silhouette like landscape situated at the
bottom of the photograph whereas the other two thirds of the image are occupied
by vibrant yet subtle tones. The viewer’s eye is drawn along the image because
of the flowing silhouetted land. My main inspiration for the initial photograph
was the photographer ‘Ansel Adams’ his work focuses on American landscapes
showing the beauty of natural scenes that we sometimes miss in modern life.
Some of his images are made using a monochrome film, lens-mounted filters (yellow
or red) to emphasise the skies and darkroom techniques that added contrast and
controlled detail. However my made inspiration for painting the sky was the abstract
work of Vincent van Gogh, his work is extremely colourful which makes his
landscapes believable, I’ve tried to convey his movement, energy and light that
his skies show. Even though his paintings are mostly about the imagination than
reality, they are still representational to landscapes such as the painting
‘Starry Night’as that was a real night sky that Van Gogh studied and observed
whilst living in the south of France. This is another element of his work which
inspired me to bring representational and abstract paintings together, concluding
that both are possible.
