Luminosity

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:

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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.

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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.

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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:

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http://www.keratoconus-group.org.uk/

 

Looking again at the human figure, I discovered the artist Daniel Richter.

I have chosen to focus on this particular image by Richter called Spagotzen, because I love the range of vibrant colours and the lack of identity he has created on his subjects, which I briefly mentioned in my first post. It is like a riot and I can imagine the figures running forward and jumping out of the 2D surface, that they chaotically inhabit and coming to life. Richter has bathed these fictional characters in an artificial glow, something that I am interested in exploring further along my practice. This has made me think about my own colour palette and below is an experimental collection of this outcome.

I have continued to make these types of small drawings, from found images on Pinterest. This series of portraits now reside in my studio space and I am happy with the overall layout of placing them next to each other and the varying colours, but I have decided not to take these any further as I don’t feel they quite fit with where I want to go. I plan to get away from the realistic aspect of the human body and maybe create a more abstract side. For now I want to focus more on the bright colours that I have shown so far and develop a strong colour palette at the end.

Moving forward…

I did some more research and found the photographer; Martin Klimas who created a range of works using paint. He used bright colours and watered down the paint, then placed this onto a speaker. When sound came from the speaker, the paint would jump up which he then caught on camera. This is just one of the images Klimas produced.

I was inspired by Klimas, not only because of the colours he used but because music had become a vital element for the work to even happen (I am a big fan of music so this appealed to me).

So one morning shortly after, when I was feeling quite arty and what soon turned into a creative frenzy, I filled the kitchen floor with several canvases. I covered them with neon paint, using an empty bottle of HP sauce to apply this and watered it down, so the paint would flow onto the canvas thinly, travelling aimlessly and entwining the colours along the way. Going back and forth and adding more. This is the end result of that day:

Reflecting back I think a majority of these paintings were unsuccessful but necessary for me to progress forward. They were rushed and not really thought about, more mad scribblings in an energetic moment. Although I have taken aspects of these further in my sketchbook work.

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I decided to try again and slightly change the canvas paintings, by thinking about the overall look and what colours would be more appealing. I think the two works below are the most successful developments so far…

By choosing a more appealing palette and blocking out parts of these two paintings, to try and almost contain the madness that was produced, has helped further my understandings and where this could lead.

I have been told that the two paintings I developed had a similar feel to Frank Auerbach’s work. I found this piece by Auerbach above, which I thought were comparable in terms of controlled, multi directional strokes, with various colours blocked in by a strong background. Auerbach’s work mainly focuses on portraits and so there may still be some traces of figurative left in my own practice.

The idea for my chosen theme for Studio practice and my Dissertation happened while reading David Batchelor’s Chromophobia. The book mentioned The Wizard of Oz in relation to colour and as I had decided that I wanted to talk about colour already, the idea of the film became my starting point. I looked at stills from the film and the different colours; I thought about re-colouring a scene with neon colours and  I also looked at nude models for inspiration (images from Pinterest)

I took an image from the internet (Wizard Of Oz) and drew it on an A6 piece of card using neon acrylic paint.

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These are the images of the models taken from Pinterest that I have used as inspiration.

This is my own interpretation of the images and I have used neon acrylic paint again and neon highlighters. I’m interested in this beyond reality (Surrealism) idea but also maintaining within reality as if two worlds living harmoniously alongside.

In The World Viewed, the philosopher Stanley Cavell writes: ‘Recent films in colour, when that fact about them goes beyond the necessity of luxury or amusement and becomes a declared condition of a medium, also allow colour to create a world. But the world created is neither a world just past nor a world of make-believe. It is a world of an immediate future. (Reed, 2007, Cited in Batchelor, 2008, p.226)

I have continued to draw a series of the female figure on a small scale, to help me think of bigger ideas and where my work can lead on to. I see them as a creative doodle to get my creativeness flowing, keeping my drawing skills active in the meantime.

This painting is on an A3 canvas; I like the colours and lack of identity of the figure (the idea of not having importance but being the focal point). I have re- worked over this canvas several times so a nice texture has been built up from previous paintings. I have stuck to limited colours and created a bold outline of the figure, only creating a simple image. By looking at this painting I have thought about not only the use of bright colours but also incorporating lights into my work (physically and photographically) I have been inspired to add lights, as an element in my work because of the influence of going to the circus as a child as well as  helping my brother with his entertainment business (Discos) and working at a nightclub. From growing up til now I have been in environments where I am surrounded with bright lights of various colours. Going back to the painting, I think its like a person at a nightclub; under the spotlight, being surrounded by glowing strips of colour (lights) It’s another world, a nightclub is one of the only places where its acceptable to drink alcohol, dance with loud music on and have these magical lights flood an area (essentially it’s a disco for grown-ups)

I decided to then go back and make a smaller work on an A4 canvas, using coloured thread and paint.

Above is the outcome, the thread looks like hair and again this partial representation of a person has an anonymous identity. I would like to add a light (LED) inside the ‘face’ and have the thread up so the light shines through. I have still to figure out how I am going to achieve this.