Self Crit-Paintings

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.