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.
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.
