From the Maggi Hambling talk that was a few weeks ago now, I was inspired by her installation at the 2013 SNAP Festival titled ‘War Requiem’. All the paintings in the building are portrait of of battlefield scenes, and she played an audio of Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem’. During the talk Hambling played a video of her installation and it played Britten’s piece, whilst the camera was moving across the room. This gave me an idea of using video in my work as a new way of communicating. The video that I watched was not available online but I found a video of Hambling briefly talking about the whole installation, with some scenes where the audio is played along with the paintings.
She did use an audio that was not her own but already composed by a musician. So I started to think does it matter if its not my own composition? At the moment I am trying to create a video using my textured self portrait as the main focus, zooming into the whole painting looking at the mark made. I have been trying to compose my own piece on the piano, using a basic chord pattern first and see how that develops.
Recently I had a photoshoot with one of my old friends from high school Emily and I wanted to capture a balance of high contrast and brightness to achieve that creepy element that Boltanski has in his work. The image has been added using high contrast and high brightness. I think on their own the images our quite powerful and I felt that I did not need to paint from them. But when I printed out the images on placed them on my wall next to my painting in my space it does not seem to fit well together, so I decided to paint from the photographs. I applied the paint on straight away and the I am happy with the finished result. At this point I feel I need to add more to my paintings using realism and working with texture.
After the feedback from my previous self portrait, I decided to paint another one on a slightly bigger scale and try not to make drastic decisions, and just see what happens when painting something completely textured. What I first done with the canvas was, I primed over a painting I done a while back that I was not that pleased with. The canvas was primed in a rush because I was excited to get painting. The primer turned out to be very streaky and at that point I felt that the primer layer is a big part of the process of the portrait, so I kept part of the primer exposed so all the layers are not lost. I did not really like the colours from the last portrait so I started with a base tone of flesh that I mixed together first then built more tones over the top of that. Once the whole face was blocked in I felt that the wide palette knife that was used was too thick, so I decided to go over the whole thing with a thinner knife to make the marks more defined so the expression of my face comes out more. With the primer part exposed on the right side of the painting I wasn’t sure whether I should block the whole canvas, but there is alot of layers to this painting, so I felt exposing another layers works well.
One of my peers mentioned how much more depth there is when I paint with texture. I agree with this, the comparison with my self portrait (also with my painting ‘Storm’) to my realist paintings could not be anymore different from each other. All of the work I have done so far each piece shows a completely different style. My painting ‘Storm’ was part of my final assessment in my second year. At first I didn’t really like it, but when it was in an exhibition soon afterwards, it sold so it made me feel differently about it.
I came across artist Andrew Salgado, his work explores ‘concepts relating to the destruction and reconstruction of identity – a process that he views as re-considering the conventions of figurative painting through a continued pursuit toward abstraction.’ Kurt Beers. His work is based on a very large scale, and this is something I want to do with a slight abstraction in the way I paint. In terms of scale at this point I want to have three strong big scale paintings that shows completely different emotions.
From a previous post I mentioned about having a intimate space with one big portrait and a few much smaller paintings around it. I feel now that with sound and other things going on, around ten portraits and a piano in one small room may seem to much and may confuse my audience. Also with the degree show approaching fast I need to think of alternatives if I can’t get the space i want.
With the idea of using certain tools to express my emotion I thought I should start a textured portrait of myself and see what happens. The day I started the portrait I felt quite angry and frustrated and I wanted get that frustration out by using a palette knife as my tool. The first image shows the first five minutes of painting, I applied the paint quite harshly and started mixing colour over colour, the palette knife as quite wide so it made it quite textured. What I like at that stage was the colours are blending together which I think gives it more character. After that I painted for the rest of the day and was intriuged to see how it would look by the time I finish. I can see me in the painting but I can’t really feel the true expression of what the emotion from the photograph was, the photograph shows me being upset and for me personally I cannot see that, but the colours and the marks made from the paint give that emotion.
I felt that I rushed the painting to much and I was not sure whether the scale works well with the power of the emotion. So at that point my ideas changed dramatically…
Painting a textured piece was quite daunting for me as it is not usually my style so I decided to smeer over the painting with a paint brush with white spirit to give that Richter look of his blurred images but blurred it so much that, that emotion then becomes more unknown. The end result finished with a streaky canvas with a range of colours along with the muddy blue to represent the emotion the best. I can still see me in the canvas but at that point I decided not to do anymore to it. My friends were shocked I done that to the canvas after having nice feedback before I smeered over it. But to be honest I still felt I made the right decision to do that, because it is about the traces of paint with this canvas.
I decided to paint my friend Anna because whilst I was in a really calm state of mind and was in the mood to paint I wanted to paint an emotion that reflects on this. I took a photo of Anna and painted straight away. This time instead of the using the grid method which takes to much preporation I painted straight onto the canvas without having an outline on. I started painting the nose then built different tones around it. I didn’t have any serious problems with the piece, some proportions were incorrect but I resolved this in the later stage. To our left, the eye and the cheek area show quite alot of smooth detail. I found this strange because the way i usually paint is, I use my finger to blend colours together rather than using a paint brush to blend tones together completely. So there is alot of traces and I think the paint communicates my different emotions I felt throughout the process. On the right hand side of the painting my attitude changed to feeling tired, and then being impatient. The skin tone looks less smooth to me and at that point I started to use my finger and started applying more colour to certain areas, more where the green tones are on the shadow areas.
I wanted to make the portrait based on realism/photorealsim i felt I achieved this originally the background was suppose to have a block colour representing the emotion that she is feeling. As I painted it on straight away the head was painted bigger than I originally intented, so not much background was exposed. i then thought as I am painting it realism it is obvious what the emotion is so I felt a black colour was not needed, so I painted a bluey-grey colour to compliment her skin tone and her hair colour.
There was a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery that i was a big influence to this portrait in particular. I saw it about three years ago but cannot find out who painted it. It was a chest hieght portrait of a black man with a flourescent pink background. I need to think more about scale now and other ways I could paint differently. Little details are to be added onto her fringe but for now going to work on something different whilst ideas are fresh on my mind.
