Here is my most recent painting.
It is developed from an image that I found on the internet, and then edited on photoshop to distort the objects in the room.
The chair appears as if sagging downwards and collapsing in on itself, while the bath and picture above curve on unnatural angles.
At 124 x 100cm, This is one of the largest paintings I have done so far, and is also my favourite out of the paintings that I have produced during this project.
I think that the colours work well together, and also that I have managed a style which is neither too simplistic or too complex, which I am happy with and which I think gives the picture a well-balanced appearance.
The only thing that I think could have worked better is that somehow the collapsing shape of the chair is not as obvious as it is in the distorted photo. However as it was extremely difficult to depict both the tone and pattern on the chair, I have left it as it is and not attempted to capture the distorted shape more accurately in relation to the photo.
Here is a photo of the painting that I developed from ‘Maze’, and also went on to develop my more recent painting A Figment of Paint from.
I enlarged the image to give it more impact and therefore dramatic effect, also adding an additional component to the composition that had not been in the previous version; the broken-off staircase on the right of the picture. This is a feature that i had been planning on since the first picture, but did not have sufficient room to include it within the frame of a picture that size.
I had a clear idea in my head of what I wanted my staircase to look like; modern and simplistic, with triangular stairs and a spiral format. I managed to find some images of staircases that matched this description on the internet, and chose one to refer to for the staircase in my painting.
I then executed my idea, which was to paint the supports of the staircase lower down, but not higher up, so that near the top there would simply be stairs that appear to hover in mid-air, leading to nowhere.
I feel this worked successfully, and also think that this picture worked better on a larger scale.
Developed from my coloured drawings of the the staircase at the Swan at Lavenham, edited on photoshop, I decided to do this painting using that same method of first drawing out the different sections of the image, then simply filling in the different sections with colours.
The idea of this painting was to create a large-scale, fragmented image with distortion to form a piece that hovered between abstraction and unreality. For this painting I worked from the image that I had distorted using photoshop tools, to twist the stairs into strange jagged angles, and make the beams between the roof and floor bend as if made of a soft material.
I was very pleased with the painting, and think that it is proving more impactful working on a larger scale.
Over the Easter holidays I created this painting, ‘Illusory Room’, which is a development of some drawings I did which in turn were composed of a mixture of different elements that I took from various paintings / prints that I had done previously.
My painting includes a lamp whose trim is dripping downwards as if melting, a detatched door with paint escaping under it into the interior, and a bunch of lilies hovering above the top of a coffee table without a vase. The walls, which slant off in different directions unlike any normal interior, are painted as if dripping downwards and merging into the floor. In this way I have designed this interior to appear as an imagined space whose fictional nature is beginning to become more apparent, as with the paint dripping under the door, exposing its illusory nature.
While researching for my dissertation, I came across a critic who wrote of the interiors of artist Rosson Crow: ….these places lack any structural coherence necessary to labelling them as true ‘interiors’. Each scene offers an amalgam of collaged perspectives, the effects of which can be unsettling. –TD Neil, 2006, p.83 This is relevant to what I am attempting to do with my current interiors, which are composed from different elements from various images of rooms put together in a single composition, and combined with confusingly-arranged walls to create a disjointed and surreal appearance. An example of this can be seen in one of my most recent paintings, A Figment of Paint, the final version of which I am currently painting onto a large canvas. In this painting I have combined disjointed staircases with zig-zag stairs, with partially hovering chairs that have parts missing from them, and a disembodied door under which a pool of green paint is escaping, as if warning the interior that it is merely an illusory scene created by material objects, and could dissolve at any minute if somebody chose to alter it. This combination of surreal and bizarre objects is designed to create a space with a feeling of theatrical falseness, and to create a sense of unfamiliarity in a category of space that would normally be everyday.
