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.
