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.
