INFLUENCES
My works of the last months have started to take a more precise shape and have boomed in colour and form. I have realised that from working in all these diverse mediums making a banana out of fibreglass, a plaster sculpture or painting figures I started to understand colour and form more, also the materials I use. Everything had a contextual back-up from the start and helped me develop my ideas further. The ideas that I have can now move on because of that. The simple form, the pure colour and raw material is what captures my imagination. I am interested in the essence and the archetype like Constantin Brancusi.
In the last 2 years I had the chance to see the work of great British artists such as Sarah Lucas and Glenn Brown. The playfulness and soft rounded shapes that Lucas employs in making her sculptures is a pivotal point for me. I am interested in perspectives of masculinity and feminine forms. I want to show the raw material (paint, wood, plaster, concrete etc) in my work, and Sarah Lucas helped me realise that.
Glenn Brown’s paintings are carnavalesque. Colour is in a state of permanent inertia. What defines his paintings is a mixture of high contrasts between paint handling and colour definitions. There is a sense of decay and floral playfulness in the way Brown treats the paint. I like the way he makes the paint look like it has been smudged or blurred so that they look as if they were painted in thick brushstrokes and they are not. Then his sculptures are only about the thickness of the paint. This is what I saw in his work, the connection between painting and sculpture.
Thomas Houseago dismantling of sculptural body into flat plaster shapes is very striking. He is a British sculptor working with various media: plaster, wood, bronze and many more. His provocative sculpture is reportedly influenced by works of Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Paolozzi and Henry Moore. According to critics, his expressive technique evokes associations with topics of sex, violence and human physiology. What interests me in his sculptures is the uniform attractiveness of the rounded shapes, white colour, and colossal dimensions. They have a prototypical feeling to them.
