Our women, children and old folk are dying. John Keane, 2004.
Whilst researching artist John Keane for my dissertation, I was lucky enough to be able to interview him. I asked him to talk about his process. I already knew that he worked from manipulated media images to make his paintings… I had done the same.
I was interested to to learn, that he used screen grabs from online videos to work from. I decided that this was an idea that could also be beneficial to my work. I played through some YouTube videos that are relevant to the work that I’m making and used the screenshot feature on my iPad, to take images from parts of the video that interested me. I discovered that by doing so, that there’s an element of chance as to how the image is taken. For example, if a person is moving or speaking, they maybe captured with their eyes closed or in mid speech. I feel that this gives the image a sense of a moment being pulled out of time, as opposed to a staged or orchestrated photograph. It has an element of spontaneity and originality, especially as each shot always seems to be that little bit different and even sometimes blurred.
