After the rather slow struggle to get my paintings to progress in the right direction, I moved from the canvas to the camera. I began by looking at the environment around me rather than the internet for inspiration, first of all indoors (my flat) taking photographs of any light sources, such as the bathroom or bedroom lighting and appliances in the kitchen and changing there appearance. I did this by putting obstacles in the way such as coloured plastic to a long exposure. A couple of examples:
The artist who has had an impact on my current work is Dan Flavin; who I have used as a chosen artist in my dissertation, because his work is bright, colourful and is the product of light itself. He takes the fluorescent tube out of its context from an everyday object and gives it another meaning, by placing it as a work of art in galleries, rather than the light simply being a tool to illuminate paintings.
The Diagonal of May 25th, 1963 by Dan Flavin.
This piece above by Dan Flavin was a pinnacle moment within his art career, when he decided to place just a light fixture onto the wall, for the first time without placing it onto another material. This idea started off his ongoing success; continuing to use just lights as his medium, and by placing them in certain ways and juxtaposing colours, he creates a variety of visually stimulating outcomes.
The image above is a photograph that I took; it’s the clock from a microwave, but I have used a slow shutter speed and moved my camera around to create this effect of the digits being repeated. I also changed the colour of the image to an overall intense blue, which reminded me of the light installation by Dan Flavin below.
Untitled (to Helga and Carlo, with respect and affection)
(1974) by Dan Flavin.
This is one of Flavin’s biggest floor installations. The lights flood the room with a powerful demeanour, you cannot escape the work, it is very much in your face, whatever wall or corner you look into. This has made me think about the scale of my own work and how to present my final outcomes. I would like to try and incorporate some source of light physically into a piece of work and make something fairly big, to see how the colours work best with what size.
Looking at another photograph I took below and on the left, while indoors was made by chucking an organza type material cloth (juggling scarf) in the air, over a ceiling light and inverting the captured shot. This reminded me of the artist; Janet Echelman’s work (on the right) which consists of giant, colourful nets, that float in the sky and that fluctuate due to the wind and when it becomes night they come to life with coloured lights being projected onto them. Echelman was recently featured at the Lumiere festival in London which I unfortunately could not attend, although it would have been a spectacular event and relevant to my practice.
I am also interested in working on or using fabric/materials like bedsheets rather than using just canvases to paint, on as I feel that they are rather restricting in terms of what I am trying to convey using both light and colour.
Now moving on from the limits of four walls, I then went for a walk at night and took my camera, exploring the streets that were glittered with many lights from shops to street lamps and traffic lights to quietly lit houses. My decision to capture these insignificant moments were due to wanting to follow on with, the strong connection I have from the influence; Dan Flavin and the need to develop this unfamiliar territory, believing it could lead me further than my paintings had done previously.
These are just a selection of what I think are my more successful photographs. I would like to project these types of images on a wall or maybe onto a painting or an object. I will eventually test this idea out…
I have started to look at other artists who use light and thought about Picasso’s light drawings as they are quite similar to my street light images.
Picasso making his ‘light drawings’
My photographs of lights also makes me think about how someone with Keratoconus might see objects after talking to my aunt who has Keratoconus; an eye condition in which the cornea is more pointed than usual, like a rugby ball shape (conical). It can cause distortion of vision, with multiple images.
A couple of examples from the internet:
http://www.keratoconus-group.org.uk/
