Artist Research Julie Mehetu
Julie Mehretu is an American painter who makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint.
“Her work is often said to be a meditation on global population shifts, urban mapping, and structural planning, and is inspired by source material as diverse as Japanese Zen ink painting and architectural blueprints”.
Her work is full of microscopic lines and shapes that instead of making the work look unclear or unessesarily complicated, actually aid in there illusion of space. It is that part of Mehretu’s work i would like to eminate. How she takes the small details of a painting and make them fit perfectly with the whole composition.
She works on a large scale, for example Stadia I is over 3.5 metres on it’s lonest side. The majority of her works start of with some kind of blueprint as a base, a city, landmark or building etc.
However what interests me most about Julie Mehetu’s work is how she combines lines and patterns to create the illusion of vast spaces.
Her work could be seen as an intermediary between artificial and natural scale. Her illusionary architectural lines combined with the vast size of the work must be incredible to experience in person.
As I said before I would like to combine these two elements within my own work with perhaps the added element of colour effects.
Ideas from my Dissertation
In my dissertation I analysed the effects of the size/ scale of an artwork and it’s ability (or inability) to evoke a sublime sensation within the spectator. While in my work I am uninterested in whether or not it can be labelled as ‘sublime’ I am interested in the size/ scale of my work affects the viewer.
In my dissertation I divided up the works I analysed into two categories: Artificial and Natural scale
Artificial scale is where the artist has used a sense of illusion to create a sense of scale within their work, such as in Darvaza by Julian Bell, he creates a grand sense of scale by positioning a tiny figure on the craters edge- which serves as a reference point to it’s vast size. Whereas Natural scale can be defined as a work that is sizeable defined by it’s physicality, such as How It Is by Miraslaw Balka- due to it’s vast size relative to the spectator.
The reason I mention this is because I have been trying to evoke a sense of space within my work by using Artificial scale- by arranging colours and shapes so they create the illusion of space.
I wonder what effects I could produce If I scaled my work up so as well as using artificial scale I would be using natural scale?
In order for this to take effect I would have to be working on a canvas/ board with sides close to two/ three metres.
One of the main reason that this method of working is so effective is that if the work is large enough it begins to engulf the viewers vision, and the viewers experience changes from viewing a painting, something that is sizably defined by it’s edges, to viewing pure blocks of colour and patterns. This has an overwhelming effects on the viewer’s senses and creates a different dimension as to how the space is perceived.
Continuing Painting (3) Size/Scale is becoming an Issue
Picking up from the last point from my previous post; that my paintings Untitled (5) & (6) had more ‘direction’ in their composition and were therefore less cluttered in shapes, patterns, lines and colours than my pervious works, I believe explains my dissatisfaction with my paintings of a larger scale.
My dissatisfaction with my larger paintings is based on their general composition. Nothing in any of them seems structured or organised and is therefore very difficult to formulate in sense of space or colour relationship in any of them.
The main problem is the scale of my paintings.
Untitled (5) & (6) were roughly 25 × 15 cm while the some of my larger paintings are 150 × 100cm. And yet for some reason I am using the same tools to create them both, the same size sponge, brush and making tape. A line created by masking tape, for example, will be (relatively) much larger on a small board than one created on a large board, therein lies my problem. Because of this I have filled my larger painting with more lines, patterns, shapes and colours than I have with my smaller paintings simply because they would “fit”.
I gave no consideration to the composition of these working or how all of these lines, patterns etc would react together. The results there for are a muddle of colours and lines, with not rhythm or order and look as if they are comprised of three or four different painting propped up beside each other.
In hindsight I should have foreseen the problem and begun to scale up all my painting utensils.
I think this is my next step, to produce painting of this size or larger but keeping in mind the composition of the painting, which to put it in black and white means having to scale up all of my lines and patterns etc.
Continuing Painting (2)
As with my previous post, this selection of paintings is also about my attempt to move my work forward through excessive painting and experimenting. These works are much the same size except for Untitled (5) & (6), both of which are roughly 25 × 15 cm.
As with before my idea with these works was to have no preconceived plan as such, but to see how I could develop my work from one painting to another. Taking something that worked, or didn’t work, and slightly alter it in another.
For example in Untitled (8) and (9) I tried to use two different contrasting colour pallets because I noticed in my previous paintings the colours where very similar in both layers- similar in the sense that the colours I used were the same but dissimilar in their position.
I hoped that this would create a contrast that would cover the painting as whole instead of in my previous painting where I would use contrasting colours to highlight certain points.
With Untitled (8) I used a very cool palate, mostly shades of blue, purple (see third image from top) I then masked out some areas and painted over the top with some warmer, lighter colours to exaggerate the space created by the tape.
In Untitled (9) I attempted to take it a step further and predominantly used orange for the first layer and blue for the second- two directly contrasting colours. There are hints of yellow, pink and green but these are more of colour and are not dominant in the picture. I believe only using two colours (two dominant colours) it gives the painting more focus. However this is quickly dismissed, or even unnoticed as, there are so many tonal changes, brush markes and flicks of paint with in the two colours.
This is in contrast to Untitled (5) and (6) which have more ‘direction’ to their composition. This is due to the fact that they are much smaller and the tools I was using (ie brushes and sponges were the same size).
Continuing Painting- As many as Possible
After my tutorial with Jane I decided that I would try to make as many paintings as possible over the course of the next week. The reason being I was getting to caught up on one painting and kept re-working and re-working it. At least if I work this way I will be able to see the evolution within my work- instead of that evolution taking place on one canvas.
So that’s what I’ve done I’ve produced around 10-12 paintings/ experiments in hope of taking my work somewhere different.
The results have been quite interesting- with more paintings working better than I expected.
Over the next couple of blog posts I will try to analyse what was successful and what wasn’t, why somethings worked and others didn’t and how I might take my practice further.
These first four paintings are on hard board and are around the 50 × 40 cm size. Like the my other works I had no preconceptions about particular colours but I was very interested in creating a sense of ‘structural space’ within each painting by using masking tape.
In my opinion these painting are my most successful to date and I believe this was down to two reasons. Firstly the harmonies between the colours and the lines and second the scale of the brush strokes and masking lines relative to the board size. The second reason requires a more detailed explanation and so I will save it for another post, but I believe the first reason is down to me becoming more instinctively aware of how colours and lines react together due to the volume of painting I’ve produced.
Of this series I believe Untitled 3 is the most successful. What works for me the most in this painting is clash of similarities between the colours and lines. In some instances the under painting almost completely matches the top layer, only with some subtle tonal differences. I have never seen this before and to me it creates quite an illusionary and discerning effect, which in turn creates a different sensation of space that would be created by contrasting colours and clearly defined lines.
