I had always found Marlene Dumas’ work difficult to relate to although I had never seen it in the flesh until recently. I went to Tate Modern to see the exhibition The Image as Burden and was surprised how little paint could make so much an impact. The eyes of her portraits, just blobs of paint are filled with so much emotion. The vivid, bright colours bringing out the soul of the person.
She has spent most of her artistic career working from media images particularly of the human figure. In 1985 she worked on a set of large blown up portraits. Speaking of the influence of film and her cropping of her subjects she stated…
“From blowing up to zooming in, the close up was a way for me to get rid of irrelevant background information, and making facial elements so big increased the sense of abstraction concerning the picture plane.” (Tate, 2015)
I found this to be relevant in the way I crop my own paintings.
Later in 2008 she exhibited a series of works under the title For Whom the Bell Tolls. These works were based on images sourced from films, focusing on the emotion represented in cinema. Dumas was interested in the way a film could make her cry and a painting could not. This mirrors my own interest in the emotion we experience from film is incredibly real and yet we know what we are observing is purely fictional. Her painting For Whom the Bell Tolls depicts the film star Ingrid Bergman tearful, staring into the distance. The surface of the canvas is scratched and the paint smudged only adding to the emotion of the face.
I was interested in her collection of Small paintings Great Men as they included brief descriptions of their biography underneath reminding me of the way I like to add description to my own works. Marlene Dumas also reminded me of the difference in impact when cropping and excluding certain information from a painting. For example The Widow 2013 was produced on two different scales one only focusing on Mrs Lumumba. Likewise, her painting of her daughter The Painter 1994 gives a certain morbid feeling. The source image was of her daughter in the garden but because of the lack of surroundings in the painting we see the innocence of childhood combined with the blood red paint on her hands making for an unsettling feeling.
