Whats next?
Having researched, explored and experimented with many new materials I feel I have the ground work done and I am ready to produce finished work on a much quicker scale. I shall continue to work with all of these new mediums as I believe they will be successful. My realist and traditional style will not be completely abandoned, I feel a show with mixed mediums and approaches could be very striking. I plan to continue my experiments with scale and layout as these would be key to making everything fit. The whole project is unified by the strength of the subject matter and therefore I can see a successful outcome.
I am settled on the materials I will be painting on, but my search for these materials has broadened to include as many found items as possible. The found items I hope to have wear and indexical traces to give these perhaps more meaning and even more layers for the viewer to explore.
The attached image is one of my larger scale pieces in progress. I intend to mix the traditional and the street stencil styles. This approach has proved successful for another artist I have researched Ernest Zacharevic.
Traditional meets Street
My aim with this small portrait was to paint in a traditional style on my found cardboard mixing in some pop art qualities such as broad blocks of colour. I did aim to complete this entirely in acrylics for speed of use however the acrylics were drying on the cardboard lightning fast. I will continue to use the acrylics as an undercoat and for the broad areas but for the more detailed elements I will revert to my preferred medium of oil. Already I am interested in the areas I could leave unpainted. Parts of the composition I feel the viewer can fill in for themselves. This one I feel already will be successful, the face is interesting and the look is good.
A Few Sketches..
Attached are two of my early sketches when composition was my main focus.
After collecting practically hundreds of videos stills, constantly pausing the screen to capture the best moment, I found myself desperately trying to find a composition where the interviewee would be looking directly at the viewer.
Due to the nature of my project, I had wanted my portraits to a have a kind of confrontational quality about them.
Ideas:
1. To crop the face where the portrait shows nothing more from the chin upwards.
2. To screenshot sections of the face to reach a higher level of intimacy.
3. For the subject to be looking directly at the viewer – very confrontational.
In some of my drawings the subjects focus is not directly at the viewer but the eyes still have major importance. When I found the eyes particularly expressive I didn’t feel the need for these to be confrontational.
The American Photorealists
As a device to remove some of my own feelings and views I have found that the use of found and secondary images and video footage very successful. The method of working from photographs is my preferred one for sheer practicality, but it can also be used to maintain some coolness and distance from the subject matter. Working from photographs as a realist painter led me to study and research the early American photorealists, how they worked and why they worked in this way. Theirs was a deadpan style with little flourish and expression, working in meticulous detail and staying faithful to the photographic source. This lack of expression allowed the subject matter to take centre stage and practically all the photorealists returned to their chosen subject matter time and time again.
By similarly creating a body of work united by a single theme I hope to focus the viewer’s attention on the issue depicted. I am not working in a photorealist style, but in common with the American photorealists I do not want to comment strongly on my subject matter, therefore allowing the viewer time and space to find their own thoughts and feelings about the people depicted. I do not wish to dictate what the viewer should feel, only present an issue for them to think more carefully about.
Having been impressed by the portrait work of Portuguese artist Vhils I began to think about how his techniques and process could work for me. The works I was most interested in were those made into the rendering on the outside of buildings in different locations all around the world.
Typically Vhils applies a coat of white paint to an existing rendered wall and chips away to reveal in some parts the grey of the sand and cement render and in other areas the entire render is removed to reveal the brick or block of the wall underneath. In this way tonal differences are achieved to create a portrait.
Time, space and expense rule me out of trying similar large scale works into walls so I thought about how I could use other multi layered surfaces. Corrugated cardboard looked to me to have some potential. Despite its light weight it is a very resilient and rugged material, so I decided to try a very small scale copy of a Vhils portrait.
The portrait I chose was Vhils contribution to Banksy’s Cans Festival 2008 in London. I chose this work because it was one of Vhils simpler but still highly effective pieces I applied a thin wash of white emulsion to a roughly 15 x 15cm square of corrugated cardboard and drew in the eyes with compressed charcoal and used pencil to draw in the lightly shaded areas of the face. Staying faithful to Vhils original, I tore away the areas Vhils had cut away to reveal the corrugated layer of cardboard underneath.
The thing I liked most about the Vhils portraits was the way the stripping of layers described the damage, the decay with the passing of time, the emotional and sometimes physical traces and shadows left on a person by their life experiences. But above all that the areas left some way intact and functioning described the resilience and strength of that person through the resilience and strength of the materials used. These portraits are to me positive and uplifting because of this.
Did the use of cardboard communicate some of these qualities in my own small scale copy? I’m glad to say that they did. The copy could never have the drama of the Vhils original but mostly I believe that this is a result of the difference in scale. The resilience and strength of the cardboard indeed transferred its own qualities into the small portrait and I was happy enough with the results to try one of my own compositions on a larger scale. One small problem was was the smaller differences in tone in the different layers of the cardboard but I am confident that these can be solved with further experiments with washes and perhaps added layers of cardboard to create greater depth and shadow.
Overall a very positive and rewarding exploration of new materials and techniques.
