[gaacrv]

[co05]

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[marinapotok]

Entrance (2015)

[omgthatstotallyme]

[purecapture-blog]

"Evening, Blue Reflection" by Kazuo Nakamura

[dosymedia]

Yoshitaka Amano

[blvkhouse]

Conrad Jon Godly

[allisonrosecast]

[alib-artstuff]

Final Major Project Evaluation

For the Final Major Project (FMP) I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do aside from the fact that it was based around Macro photography, the Statement of Intent (SOI) although I had set out a direction and a timeline for my project to go, had been left with vague areas so as to allow a certain degree of freedom ranging from the materials used, whether I was using 2D or 3D elements or both. 

Although I had been placed into Drawing and Painting for the FMP, no area specifically relies on what is most associated with them which is why I kept the 3D part an option.  The SOI was always a way to allow me to experiment and keep my options open so as to explore different areas and see which areas I could develop further.

At the beginning I had planned to extend upon both the four week Drawing and Painting rotation and the four week Textiles rotation if only in the fact that both concentrated on macro images allowing me to create pieces that had a focus on the subject and to put an emphasis on the subject in a way that could make the viewer pay more attention to them.  Having looked at the work of Georgia O’Keeffe I had decided that this was going to be my aim, to put attention of something that may be taken for granted or isn’t as noticed as it should be.  My initial subjects that I had picked to look at in closer detail were hands, carrying forward from the four week rotation, a rose, jewellery, guitars and not quite as important but the view out of a bathroom window which had a distortion to it because of the glass. 

I had spent up until the two week holiday focusing on certain things as listed above but was starting to run out of steam and also was starting to irritate me as I couldn’t achieve abstract with representational by using only images and paintings.  I put my focus solely onto music and guitars as this plays a much more important part to me than any of the other objects I had been looking at but would allow me to incorporate a 3D element by using casts of guitars.  This change is also the reason for the name change from Altered Macro/Macro Me to just Macro Me as even though the final piece isn’t specifically based on me it is based on something that has a lot of meaning to me.

Before the change in direction I had been trying to recreate work similar to my four week drawing and painting rotation, using oil bar which has a subtle, ethereal feel but found this to be unsuccessful.  Using other materials I was always getting drawn  to acrylic paint as this is a media that I feel I am confident to a degree but still have a lot to learn about especially in application and use of colour so it was a good chance for me to try and push myself further .

The aim had been to use palette knives to create a textured piece, the colours dependant on what the subject was but I always came back to a flatter but still slightly textured through use of a dabbing technique which was a basis for adding in the gradients to the sections I was painting.

My choice of colour was pulled back to blue as I felt I could work with it better due to the paints I had available and also through having worked with it for the previous two four week rotations.  The reason for blue is it was quite ambiguous when I first started using it in the drawing and painting rotation as to whether it was happy or sad, partially holds a bit of mystery but is also calming which was a factor.  I don’t believe I could have made this work in any other colour due to having quite a few elements but allowed this to deviate when it came to the background with warmer colours due to the way the sheet music images printed.  I had considered using a lot of colour but ruled this out because I always find that too much colour can be distracting when not contained in separate sections.

The introduction of using casts in my final piece wasn’t a sudden thing, I had been thinking over this but unless I had been focusing on the one thing, guitars, I wouldn’t have been able to fully utilise adding them to my final piece.  The process for this was to use modelling fabric on a guitar covered with cling film and Vaseline, once dry sand off the rough parts, paint with a base coat and that was them ready for painting on with acrylic paint.  I had made smaller casts beforehand when I changed direction slightly but another half cast was made and cut up into sections.

I had been fighting over how to remove the images from looking like guitars, having added in the casts I sorted my issue of having something representational but I still could not get my head around making what I was painting look less like what it was until I had seen what other people in the class had been using, origami cubes.  Utilising origami techniques I used photographs I had taken of my guitars and morphed these into cubes, this was the perfect way to get an image I could work from that looked nothing like a guitar but at the same time I knew what these were images off which balanced out the representational/abstract issue I was having.

When I had first decided to change direction to focus on guitars I had in mind something including casts and possibly guitar stings linking these to paintings done similar to the work of Georgia O’Keeffe to highlight specific parts of the guitar, as I made progress I felt that breaking this up and combining in a different way would make this work better, all the elements were still quite separate, the 3D and 2D parts, but there was a connection between them and it forced me to think more about layout and presentation, something that at times had escaped me until I was struck with more than one route and had to make decisions.

Artists and art styles that influenced me throughout this project followed on from the previous two rotations, binging forward Georgia O’Keeffe for her close up macro style and Yan Pei Ming for his use of monochromatic colours these were artists I had in mind at the beginning.  As the FMP progressed I found I was heading towards Cubism and the work of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Arthur Segal, not just for the way in which I had been painting but also for the way I presented my final piece, with Cubism about different viewpoints it made me think about the possibility of incorporating other viewpoints which led to the layering on my final piece.  I found that as I was branching out for the background that Idris Khan and Gherasim Luca brought together the alterations needed for photographs I took of sheet music by combining the layering of Khan and the Cubomania technique created by Luca.  By taking bits from each of these artists I found that it opened up more possibilities and directions to go but I ended up focusing on a few to keep myself from straying too far into areas that I wouldn’t be able to combine to create the final piece.

The issues I had to overcome were the weight and size of the piece having had to scale down as I didn’t know where I was hanging helped in a way but I got around this by sectioning off the cast into what I could use and put the rest to the side.  Another issue I had to get around is when creating the back that all the casts and squares were to be attached to I had to not come up with a solution for flattening out the cardboard as when using pva to attach the printed out cubomania inspired sheet music it warped the cardboard, to flatten this out I had to attach another piece of cardboard to the back, stich the edges to keep them from separating and also sandwich the cardboard between heavy objects, despite this not working fully it did resolve the worst of it and during hanging I made the decision to nail in the piece at the top and the bottom to keep it against the wall as it was still curved and trying to pull away.

What I have learned from this project is to combine ways to alter images, the initial idea was far from prefect and it naturally rolled and morphed into what the final piece is now but through combining different aspects that I found appealing I found my own way to interpret these and to make them work together.  I tried to keep an open mind when it came to artists but I couldn’t help but be caught up in what interested me

If I had a second chance I would have created this on a larger scale which was partly an issue of not knowing where exactly my piece was going to be hung as initially the plaster cast I had made did weigh a bit more than I had expected and I decided to scale this down to allow me to hang it without too much difficulty.  If there were no time constraints, money constraints or space constraints I would have created a piece to fit a whole room, top to bottom to envelop a person as they walked through, to make an impact, add something for all the senses and to grasp their attention, to make them stop and think whether they hate it or love it or having their sense bombarded turns into an adventure or a nightmare.

I think seeing my final piece as a whole with all the elements pulled together, despite the number of changes and the numerous different areas I looked at on the route, allowed me to fully realise where exactly I had been going.  Throughout the project I had touched upon different areas but hadn’t fully tried out all the parts together until near the end of the project which could have ended up quite disastrous.

The final resulted in something I had never imagined myself creating, it had never been a possible outcome even after the route change and up until the last week it wasn’t until some of the decisions had been made that it started to morph into how it now looks.  There was a fair bit of doubt as to whether the 2D and 3D elements would come together and if the background would make the piece pull together but I believe out of the decisions I had to make that the right ones were made.

[alib-artstuff]

Top - Flower of Life

Middle - Flower of Life II

Bottom - Flowers of Fire

Georgia O’Keeffe

I chose to look at Georgia O’Keeffe because having previously looked at her work for the last course it struck me that it related to how I was taking photographs for the drawing and painting rotation and how I was then trying to use those photographs.

She was greatly influenced by her husband, avant-garde artist Alfred Stieglitz and through this adopted abstract art until the 1920’s when she began working in floral motifs with hints of Surrealism. Heading towards the end of her life she moved to New Mexico where the desert scenery became the focus of her work.  Other influences seem to have been the natural world based on her paintings of still lifes and landscape compositions from a young age, she also appeared to be influenced by forms of the female body and genitalia as reflected through nature, and thus by the feminist movement of the early 20th century..

In her early years she explored abstraction as a means of self expression which distinguished her from her American contemporaries with their representational art.  She began experimenting with more abstract work having held an exhibition where she realised she had made the work in that exhibition to please others and decided to go in a new direction that would be hers alone by limiting herself to charcoal on white paper beginning a series of abstract drawings.

She expanded her experimentation to the medium of watercolour and eventually returned to full colour where she became sophisticated with watercolour by using it to capture and convey her enthusiasm for the sky and landscapes she witnessed in Texas where she was living at the time. Through her abstraction were also recognisable forms which although representational they were equally read as abstract.  This forms a trend that would continue through her career by exploring abstraction and representational.

She moved away from Texas to New York in which she transitioned to working primarily in oil with a focus on precision and more representational forms which may suggest an active response to Modernist photography.

In the 1920’s O’Keeffe established herself as a painter of recognisable forms, for which she is best known for today, and developed methods to representation that revealed her fascination with Modernist photography.  Her large scale paintings of flowers, leaves and trees frequently present close up views of natural forms.

In 1929 she started to take many trips to New Mexico, finally moving there permanently in 1949 from where she made various paintings of architecture, tree and landscape forms that held her attention.  From the 1930’s she focused mainly on areas south and west of Taos that were her favourites and provided her with inspiration for the next 40 years with bleached desert bones and the stark but brightly coloured red and yellow hills and cliffs becoming frequent subjects in her work.

I like her use of oil to create the shaded and blending, she can create defined lines yet have a mix of colours that don’t all blend into one completely. With my use of soft pastels and clear oil bar I have achieved a similar effect in my own pieces because of the way I can manipulate the blending.

Although I can’t relate these directly to my pieces in terms of subject I have tried to use her inspiration of photography to allow me to take some photos that I think could have the same effect when I’ve created this in another media.  I have kept more of the form and image as I don’t like going too abstract and I’ve not made my lines so defined but it was a step in a direction to have a closer look at my subject, hands,

What also drew me to look at her work again was her use of colour, although mine is primarily a blue/white mix (possibly orange, have yet to decide) I feel that she also has a limit but more of a cold or hot colour mix.

Her work although unusual in terms of creating a macro style painting creates an impact because in reality these images are larger than life representations of flowers, enlarged to capture the viewer and make them stop and take a look at some of the smaller details in life that can be overlooked.  I may not have been aiming for this in my work but I believe my focus for the final piece was about creating a connection, I look at my work and see a subtle side and an intimacy that can be felt by anyone but may be missed in real life.

[alib-artstuff]

Reblogging from drawing and painting four week rotation as is still relevant to the FMP.

Again an emphasis on the macro style which is what i was looking at but like Georgia O'Keeffe I had an aim to draw attention to something that may go unnoticed.  Guitars and music are more often listened to and not so much looked at be it the physical instrument or the sheet music unless it is off interest to a person.  I don't know if I managed to pull this off, to me I did as I mixed the parts close up with casts of certain parts of a guitar but this was more to allow the view to have some idea of what I was creating a close up of and make it easier for me to abstract my piece by having somethign as the object and the images altered.

[alib-artstuff]

Helgoland

Regenbogen

Strasse Auf Helgoland II

Arthur Segal (1875-1944)

Born in Romania to Jewish parents, worked against his will in his father’s bank but practiced drawing and painting. Studied at Berlin Academy in 1892, was taught by Ludwig Schmid-Reutte and Adolf Hoelzel (Hölzel) after moving to Munich in 1896.  Continued his studies in Paris and Italy from 1902-3.  Was influenced by the work of Giovanni Segantini and Italian divisionism (a Neo Impressionist art style that employed the use of dividing the colours into individual dots or areas that interacted optically, differs from pointillism which focuses on the use of dots but not the separation of colours).  Segal’s work changed in terms of new colour ranges and different brushstrokes as he transitioned to expressionism.

Returned to Berlin and exhibited with Berlin Secession (an art association founded by Berlin artists as an alternative to the Association of Berlin Artists) then joined the Neue Secession, exhibiting alongside Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other Die Brucke (The Bridge) artists (a group of German expressionist artists sometimes compared to the Fauves for the way in which they shared an interest in primitivist art and expressing extreme emotions using colour and complete abstraction).

Segal experimented with making oil paintings and woodcuts in an Expressionist style and moved into creating optical equi-balance art (Segal sought to break with a single point of focus or compositional dominance ‘In nature everything is of equal importance and interest.’ This was to achieve a new sense of balance) and episodic narrative paintings.  Following on from his ‘equi-balance’ work he began experimenting with prismatic painting, a formula he derived from his ‘equi-balance’ paintings and exchanges of idea with philosopher Salomo Friedländer-Mynona.  He also experimented with ‘optical relief’ and ‘new naturalism’.

Moved to London in 1936 and formed his own painting school but died in 1944 due to a heart attack.

I wasn’t specifically looking for an artist to look into more when I came across Segal’s work but there was an instant draw to several pieces that I couldn’t help but post.  The definition between the sections grabbed me, images still clear but all fragmented and almost negative in colour to the sections beside them.  I was trying out something only similar in terms of the gradual changed in colour from one side of a section to another but the light/dark meeting at the edges strike me the most.  I look at Segal’s work and think that I am on a similar track but at the same time not quite as clear cut on difference between colour and areas, I feel like I have a slightly different subdued version but his work has made me think more about the contrast between the areas I have been painting and also the gradient.

Granted I am working on taking parts of images from altered photos using origami but the lines that these produce help me work towards a similar broken, faceted image.  As this project has developed I’ve much more of an interest in controlled subtle changes meeting harsh contrasts but at the same time I know what it is meant to be, a close up look which I have possibly taken past representing what a guitar looks like, in the past I wouldn’t have liked the route I’ve gone down but seeing certain work like that of Segal has opened me to a different ways of representing what I see but still making it work for me in my own way by combining it with physical elements.

[alib-artstuff]

Still Life with Guitar

The Old Guitarist

Guitar Player

Head

Pablo Picasso

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, in 1881, son of an art teacher, and through his life became proficient in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, ceramics, mosaics, stage design and graphic arts.  From a young age he excelled as a draftsman, being admitted into advanced classes at the Royal Academy of Art in Barcelona at the age of 15.  His early works drew influence from Toulouse Lautrec but throughout his life influence came in the form of from other artists and the world around him ranging trips through Spain and the suicide of a friend showing in his Blue Period work to Cezanne and African sculpture showing in his Cubist work to the bombing of the Spanish town Guernica in his painting Guernica as a condemnation of fascism and war.  His work covered many different periods which alone each seemed to have a different influence before moving onto another period.

Although various other artists are mentioned it is mainly Picasso along with Braque that are credited with the invention of Cubism starting with Analytical Cubism with both artists drawing influence from the work of Paul Cezanne due to his later works and how they represented three dimensional forms.  Cubism itself being defined as objects analysed which are then broken up/reduced/fragmented and reassembled so as to abstract the form and represent it from a number of viewpoints and perspectives so the subject is shown in a greater context.

Analytical cubism spanned 1909 to 1911, with the invention of shapes and characteristic details to represent the whole object with most of the pieces being uneventful subjects such as still lives depicted as monochrome and unemotional.  The subjects were analysed and reduced into basic geometric planes with colour being almost non-existent with only use of grey, blue and brown due to the focus on the shapes used to show the essence rather than the appearance of the subject.  Picasso used a more geometric approach so as to create an abstract style, although they were not classified as abstract works of art, as opposed to Braque who approached it using a faceted way so as to create a recognisable and figurative image while Picasso bridged the abstract and served as the link between Braque’s style and pure abstract art which followed cubism.

The next stage of Cubism was known as Synthetic Cubism which saw the characteristics change to introduce different textures, surfaces, collage elements and a variety of merged subject matter.  Opposing the breaking down and reassembling of Analytical Cubism, Synthetic Cubism was a matter of synthesizing new structures both recognisable and barely legible by introducing other materials, using collage in ways such as overlapping media, adding words, graphics and patterns to achieve the desired result.  In a way Synthetic Cubism could be considered as the first Pop Art with the integration of real life with use of materials used for commercial purposes ranging from newspapers and advertisements to other objects such as sheet music and cigarette packets.

I think throughout this FMP the artist I have failed to mention or properly post about is Picasso.  There is so much about his work that I could attribute towards some of my decisions and routes I have explored yet possibly in a way that hadn't revealed itself to me until I had shown my dad my final piece and he likened it to some of Picasso's work.  I had looked at the work of Georges Braque and along with Picasso both played a part in the deconstruction/reconstruction of my final piece, if I was to make it 'abstract' in any way it was the alteration of views and the layout but I took a different approach with the 3D elements.

Looking at Picasso's work for the 3D part, in particular his cardboard guitars was a way to experiment with potential materials although I didn't use a cardboard guitar in the final (was a bit too vertical/horizontal for me to work with) it allowed me to layer up elements which in turn allowed me to use some of the techniques I'd used in the cardboard experiment to the squares in the final piece.

What has been a draw towards his work also is his way of dealing with areas in his cubist pieces, the attention in particular to the way he rarely has light/light or dark/dark but tries to find a light/dark meeting, hard to understand what I mean but if looking at the last image no two edges seem to have the same next to it, always a separation, there is almost always a dark to light aspect when moving to the next area which I also try to use in my work.

A last element I have taken from his work is his monochromatic style, for the most part I have gone for a blue/green mix and have always had a like for The Old Guitarist ever since the ND course where I looked at the work of David Hockney who's The Blue Guitar series was based on a poem by Wallace Stevens whos poem was based on The Old Guitarist.  I love the blues in this, they are bold in areas yet subtle in others creating a stark contrast between skin and the surrounding clothes/area.  In a way I believe I have managed to create a similar effect in my final piece and in the development work, possibly not as contrasting but enough to have a dark/light meeting.

Although there is only certain works by Picasso I like I do find I draw a lot from them, possibly more than I realised but manage to make my work my own.

[alib-artstuff]

FMP thoughts

So I was thinking about influences and why I have made some of the decisions I have regarding how I ended up with my final looking the way it does.  The ways in which I've abstracted pieces of my final, my colour use and the focus for the piece.

I always have preferred art that resembles something I can relate to or looks somewhat like what it's supposed to be unless there is a process I can see for deconstructing it into it's elements and for me to achieve certain styles I have to find ways to make it from an image that I know to be exactly what it is to something that isn't in a controlled way.  It's a process, I can't go from an image to looking nothing like what it is as for me it's missing out key processes and doesn't sit well with me which is why photography always plays a key part for me and manipulation of this either digital or physical, much like the way I've used photographs I took and turned them into origami cubes so as to alter what I'm seeing.  It's probably the first 'abstract' thing I've been happy with this year as it's been on my terms.

I start to wonder if it's hereditary or learned as my dad has the same issue with abstractions and a key thing he once said always sticks with me 'you have to learn to draw something and understand it before you can deconstruct it'.

As for colour choice and going blue, it's been carried on from the drawing and painting rotation, through textiles and now into the FMP.  I'm sure some stuff that happened during the course contributed to my choice considering how it made me feel and was a major game changer during the first 4 week rotation.

I think as the FMP progressed I felt more of a connection to my piece than before as it has a deeply personal meaning to me which probably wouldn't be apparent other than thinking I'm interested in guitars/music.

[alib-artstuff]

Fully constructed final piece!  So glad this is finally done.

The last image shows how I've finally got it attached to the wall using nails straight through the piece, for a few reasons, it was to stop the curve affecting anything else I'd used (double sided tape) and it will also be easy for me to get down using long nosed pliers as is it not entirely flush with the wall.

If someone had told me I would create something that looked like this I wouldn't have believed them.  I never imagined my final piece looking like this, it was mainly down to last minute decisions to try and make something that could have been awkward more manageable depending on the space I was to hang in so it was scaled down quite a bit but it allowed me to create something that in all honestly I'm for once happy with :)

(some posts may be edited when I make more sense and I'm not so tired)

[alib-artstuff]

Finally I assembled all the elements.  To start with I initially had the casts and the painted squares I was to use laid out on the board.  The casts I seemed to gravitate to a certain layout whereby the bigger casts were at the bottom.  I decided to use pva as it had proved effective at sticking down the pre show show pieces and they've been battered about a bit since then.

The squares had a similar layout with more of the bigger squares towards the bottom.  I used small cardboard tubes that been in the middle of the plaster bandages rolls to then give the squares height from the cardboard, these I covered in the images of sheet music I'd used on the cardboard to keep them in line with the piece, the white I didn't feel fit with the blue  and luckily I had spare sheet music image squares left over.

[alib-artstuff]

Creating the backing for the casts.  As I'd stated in a previous post I wasn't sure about the back, mainly because again of space issues and what looked like it worked when all the elements came together. 

Throughout this whole project I intended on using cardboard and other things I already had to put what I'd been storing to use for once.  The backing was created first using a 45x80cm piece of corrugated cardboard, using the cubomania technique of cutting an image into squares (although I used more than one image) and sticking these down to create a collage of sorts. I used ocaldo pva but not what was included in the art pack this year or what is down in the shop, the adhesive/medium/varnish is the only one that created the shine and didn't look like it soaked in which thankfully I had enough of to get to the end of making this.

An issue this created was because I was gluing these down I wanted these to stay in place and not get damaged so I used the pva to create a varnish but in doing so when this dried I had gone from a flat piece of cardboard to one that had warped and created a bit of a wave.

The first solution was to back it with another piece of corrugated cardboard but because of how warped the first was it kept pulling up at the ends. Solution two was to stitch these together (thanks to diburnett-fad for this as she suggested and completed the task as I was getting far too annoyed with it not working) this was effective at keeping the ends together but there was the issue of the curve still being present.  The third solution was leaving it overnight between two portfolios with two of the plastic folios and a sketchbook on top...this still hadn't worked so while at college I left it between two boards, had two heavy sketchbooks, a laptop and a box of plaster bandages on top....still no luck in completely flattening it but a fair amount of the wave was now gone.

[alib-artstuff]

Time to catch up on posts.  Been that busy constructing the final piece I've neglected to update with process until now.

The half cast completed, now due various reasons (not knowing where I was hanging, having to be wary of weight, how it would be hung, drying issues due) I ended up cutting the cast into sections to make it easier to work with and select pieces as I needed.

Each of the pieces was treated in the same way, sanded, painted with a base coat which makes it easier for me to paint on with acrylic, sanded again and then painted with acrylic.  

Used my photographs as a reference but altered them by turning them into origami cubes which allowed me to distort how these images looked and proved quite interesting to me to paint from.