Black & White/ Monochrome.
Colour is a very communicative devise in painting. Often a mood can be easily established in a painting through association of colour and emotion. Very much the same way that large scale can easily communicate an element of power or confrontation over the viewer.
I have been transferring my paintings into black and white using photoshop as a device to see my paintings in a different way – Tonally is it correct? Also because changes like that or viewing paintings in a mirror or upside down can help me see changes i want to make.
This process as well as seeing ‘Thingly Character IV’ at the Saatchi Gallery has prompted me to paint in mono chromatic colour. I want to see how this affects my language.
To me black and white imagery speaks of anxiety. It isn’t trying to be reality, reality is colourful. There is something trapped about mono chrome. It is like looking at flesh contained in a TV set, stopping and pausing a moment.
I bought a book from the Saatchi Gallery – ‘The Body’ by Thames & Hudson which, is filled with black and white photography of different bodies – some deformed and distorted. This has also lead me to naturally progress to experimenting with monochromatic colour. Originally I wanted to appropriate various images of flesh perhaps from newspapers however with media appropriated images there is a likely hood that they have been messed with. My intention is that I will absorb these images and use them to create images of my own flesh.
In my dissertation I looked at ‘Hard, Fast and Beautiful’ (2000) by Cecily Brown and found it produced an element of terror. This was supported by Richter’s claim that Grey scale imagery emits terror and something negative.
I have also been looking at the work of Yan Pei Ming an example being ‘Autoportrait’ (Mars) 2000, oil on canvas.
