Going back to the last few posts, I talked about Hambling’s installation ‘War Requiem’. I mentioned about doing a video of my textured self-portrait and I have now created one and uploaded it to youtube. The video is 3 minutes and 31 seconds long and I added a sequence of photos of my painting starting from the bottom to the top and then finishing with the painting as a whole. Originally I was going to combine my own composition to the video, but I felt that as this is an experiment, I would add a song that fits well with me and with how emotional I was that day. The original photograph, which I took myself, was a day I felt upset and angry and I wanted that frustration out onto the canvas. The song I chose is ‘Nuvole Bianche’ by Ludovico Einaudi, listening to the piece and watching the video in progress, I felt that it is the perfect song for me. I personally felt the movement and the colour of the paint fit very well together.
Yesterday I went to record the song on piano using a recorder and a midi cable so no background noise could be heard, but some problems occurred. The cable would not work, so the only other option would have been to play it with the background noise. I felt that the background noise would confuse and distract the audience. The perfect environment that worked well for me was it to be played in a dark room on your own, sitting back with your earphones in and watch the video full screen and focus on the movement and the colour of the paint and listen to sounds on top of it…..also play the video in HD so the texture of the paint is clear as it can be.
Next step for me is to create that environment in the black space in the studio and set up a projection of the video and create that exact environment. If no one can see or feel the same of how I felt that does not matter so much to me, I know everyone is going to react differently. After I’ve done that experiment I’m going to make the three large canvases that I would like to be in the final degree show, if the projection experiment work I may sway towards that idea, so we will see what happens. Due to copyright for the audio I would have to find a way to record the song myself, but for now I’ve attached a link for the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdDDY5nVA3A
Talking to some people at the UCS show at Marylebone Church in London, it was mentioned that my painting has a haunting religious element to it and fits well with the surroundings . I did find it strange seeing the painting in different locations, my thoughts change each time. In my second year I painted my hands holding water and my thoughts were not to make it symbolise any religion or anything, more to capture the abstraction of the water. As that painting developed it emerged into an installation participation piece, where the audience can express their thoughts when they see the painting.
Going back to what my peers said about the Del Rey painting at Marylebone I remembered an artist I researched not long ago. Akiane Kramarik is a child prodigy artist and poet born in the US who says that god gave her the ability to paint and see all of these places that are not real, she then paints these visions onto canvas. One painting in particular that felt relevant to what I’m doing with my work is the piece ‘Filtering Self Awareness’, for a final piece I would like to paint maybe a self portrait with a similar composition, full of different textures.
Recently I have been looking at Francis Bacon’s work and was really interested in how he uses photography to create his work. I found out by someone from the art staff that when creating a portrait like his ‘Self Portrait’, he looks at different compositions of someones face from a few photographs, and then paints sections from all the photographs. Bacon found that the perfect picture is not a copy of reality.
I’ve also looked at Bacon’s portrait of the Pope the Innoncent X or commonly known as ‘The Screaming Pope’, solely based on how much power the paint has to the viewer, well with me it had that impact. The expression of the subject and the streaks going down the canvas bring that emotion out alot, I felt that it gave it a sense of movement of him screaming so load it shakes the canvas. Bacon used the same composition as Valezquez’s portrait of him a few centuries ago. Also its also been known that he might of been inspired by a painting done by Titian titled ‘Portrait of Cardinal Filippo Archinto’ 1558 which shows half of the subjects face hidden behind a transparent curtain and visually looks like how the lines were created from Bacon’s version.
We had the art auction a couples weeks ago and it went really well, here’s the piece I submitted for the auction a portrait of David Bowie. Yesterday I went to the Marylebone Parish Church in London for the Contemporary British Painting show that my piece ‘Falling Into The Abyss’ was selected for. At the moment my intentions with this project were about how the audience reacts to a piece in different environments. Having this piece hung up in my studio for a while, and then in an exhibition in Ipswich and then London, I’m interested to see how people from different places react and to see what they think or how they feel when they see the painting. Seeing the painting hung up I felt it fitted really well with its surroundings. It also made think again more about scale…the area was quite large, looking where my painting was placed I think I could worked on a much bigger scale. The emotion in the painting is not a powerful dark emotion, but I imagine when its bigger it would create more of an impact. During the trip to London I went to the National Portrait Gallery to find the portrait of the black man with the bright flourescent background and I finally found out who painted it. Looking at the painting now it is not completely relevant to the portrait of Anna but I like the randomness of the colour choice.
