Thought Process and research for assignment 2: Homage
(Dated: March 29th, 2017; Wednesday)
What/Who I want to pay Homage to?
Lillian Schwartz and her work.
Most of her work deals with comparisons. She compared the facial structure of Mona Lisa with her portrait painter, Leonardo da Vinci. She also compared the perspectives of the fresco where the Last Supper was supposedly held with the architecture of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Her life’s works were typically avant-garde for their time, often manipulating the digital medium before computers were widely available and popular. Her works were notably the pioneer for advancing computers as the futuristic medium, and many of her films were highly acclaimed.
Her works in comparison do not just stop at the Mona Lisa, though. She often delves into digital collages, which is the sampling of various materials and putting them together to form works, with the materials being of the digital sort.
Another great work of hers was to observe the similarities between the Droeshout portrait of William Shakespeare and the Armada portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. Similarly to what she did with Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci, the outcome she gathered from such an experimental collage turned a few possibilities on questions that have plagued the art world.
The vanguard of my work is Digital Collage, which is the bulk of Lillian Schwartz’s work, of whom I am paying homage to. I enjoy the process of collaging, and bringing it into the digital context allows me to explore new ways of processing various media, working with new software, and enhancing existing collaging skills.
Some preemptive work I have done was to superimpose parts of a portrait of photographers with the portraits of their subjects. Surprisingly, this early work allowed me to face the difficulties of scaling images to fit, as well as observe the possible similarities between an artist’s style between self-portraits and portraiture. (See: Portraits? Portraits!)
However, as time passed, and I observed many different works by different artists, I began to feel that my work was too naive, too simplistic. Not that the impact it had was meaningless, I only felt I could delve further into portraiture, digital collage, and comparison.
