With the different emotions that I’m trying to capture using the medium of paint, at the moment I’m now focusing on monochrome colours and start thinking about sound. I encountered the music video titled ‘Blue Jeans’ by Lana Del Rey and it’s about how a couple were planning a big part of the lives together, but unexpected circumstances took that away from her, it then made her felt lost to the world. I took some screenshots of the video and wanted to capture the biggest emotion that relates to the story the most. The image of Lana’s face multiplied into a blurred effect work really well to get the emotion of feeling of lost coming through. Gerhard Richter was a big influence at that point and I would like to paint that way but with my own style. I like the monochrome of black used, it gives it a dark element to the video, which I then think relates to Christian Boltanski’s work. His work is about losing a sense of someone’s identity. The blurred effect of the image seems like the emotion she was feeling at the time is trying to escape from her memory but it cannot be completely erased. Some things can be restored and then that pain will go, but as Boltanski quotes about childhood:
‘I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child. I remember the Little Christian that is dead inside me.’ (Boltanksi, n.d.)
