5 key points – Documentation
1. Initially exploring environmental harm through collage and drawing – Initially, my practice visually aimed to explore and investigate the environmental harm that our planet experiences and to highlight the causes and effects of environmental issues. I wanted to bring to light the fact that our world is under threat and display some sort of reality of today’s landscape, rebelling against the natural landscape beauty idyll that people cling on to. I started exploring these issues by experimenting with different ways of collating imagery of environmental harm together. Some simple, combining images together into one, others were scratched and ripped and defaced, echoing the damage that’s being done to the earth. The small vibrant collages I had made at this point seemed as if they were not achieving my aims and were too attractive. I later realised that maybe this wasn’t the case.
https://gemmaschiebefineart3.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/experimenting-with-collage/
2.Experimenting through painting – depicting landscapes incorporating scenes of environmental harm and adding materials associated such as oil and litter – I started exploring similar ideas through painting. It was realised that this work didn’t represent a reality that is being overlooked. The landscapes weren’t believable and showed more or an apocalyptic view with no hope. There was nothing in them to attract the viewer. There is an attraction to the beauty of nature in images of natural landscapes, I realised that my work needs to rely on this attraction in order for it not to be overlooked as environmental issues are so often overlooked. There needed to be an element of attraction repulsion within my work and so I started thinking about using the beautiful landscape imagery that people hold nostalgia for to highlight environmental issues.
https://gemmaschiebefineart3.wordpress.com/2015/11/14/large-modern-day-landscape-work-painting-with-waste-oil-and-crude-oil/
3. Large Scale Painting – I decided to experiment on a larger scale to see whether it brought anything to my work. Now with contrasting nature with environmental harm at the heart of my practice, I painted a large natural landscape incorporating scenes of environmental harm. This was not successful at all. This piece was again not a believable image, my painting skill lacked, the image was flat and the perspective wrong. I hadn’t addressed an element that I now realise is key to my practice. I wasn’t painting from life or from a photograph, I had an image of what a landscape was in my head and painted from it. When challenging nostalgia for beautiful natural landscape paintings and representing our current surroundings there needs to be a sense of reality that echoes the landscape and it wasn’t apparent in my work so far. Depicting the reality of the landscape is impossible without a more realistic and believable image. This caused me to revaluate my practice, and to think about what was successful and how to move forward.
https://gemmaschiebefineart3.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/working-on-a-large-scale-landscape-exploration-nature-juxtaposed-with-environmental-harm/
4.Revisiting Collage and Painting from them – I came to the conclusion that my cut out collage works had been the most successful element of my practice so far, they had an attraction that they relied on to expose the viewer to imagery of environmental harm, a sense of reality without rules of perspective and challenged nostalgia for traditional landscape scenes by changing both the format and content. I don’t know why I hadn’t realised this and thought about painting them before but it was now obvious that that was what I had to explore. Before embarking on this, I had to improve my painting skill, I needed to be able to translate these collages into paint believably, I wanted the works to become a landscape piece in itself, not lots of different images stuck together, I wanted to make it evident that these different elements exist in the same world. I hoped they would be read as a landscape even though the perspectives and format was untypical. I started learning and teaching myself painting skills such as under painting and glazing to equip myself to make these works successful.
https://gemmaschiebefineart3.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/reflecting-and-creating-collages-combining-nature-with-environmental-harm-imagery/
5. Experimenting with a variety of Painting techniques to complete my degree show work and displaying my final pieces – After painting one piece with a sense of reality, It was mentioned that I needed to keep these works fresh for myself and fresh for the viewer. I was making paintings, not copying collaged photographs and that needed to be evident in my work. The photographs have been reimagined through paint. I explored a variety of different painting techniques including block colour, complementary colour, the use of silhouettes, impressionist mark making etc. which most definitely challenged me. As well as keeping it interesting for me, I think the different techniques help capture the interest of the viewer, if they were all the same, photographic copies of my collages with nothing standing out, the attraction may not be as prominent and I imagine they could also be easy to overlook. They are all different and so encourage you to take them all in.
In terms of displaying my work, I decided to keep the quality of the collage and display them evidently as paper works. I felt that framing them would separate them from the viewer, putting a barrier between them and the work. I decide to hang them in a line around the three surfaces, and place the piece I felt to be the most eye catching near the centre, hoping people will be drawn to it, walk closer and be surrounded by my work, highlighting the fact that they depicted environment is one they are part of, not separate from.
Progress 5th Painting: Block Colour, Simplified Shapes and Complementary Colours
5 Key Points – Contextualisation
1. Robert Bateman – Robert Bateman creates paintings that contrast the natural land, environment and wildlife with similar imagery incorporating environmental harm. Conceptually this work achieves things that I set out to achieve in my work. The examples on my blog show a forest contrasted with imagery of deforestation and wildlife with litter and oil that could harm the animals etc. This fits in with my ideas surrounding contrasting the natural land with environmental harm, although this work almost has a before and after theme to it because of the way the images are divided, which is something I definitely do not want in my work. I want to build on this influence and I want my work to integrate imagery and I don’t want my work to emit the idea that the natural and the harmed land are separate because they exist in the same environment.
2. John Akomfrah “Vertigo Sea” – John Akomfrah talks about imagery being put together and having a dialogue. Putting imagery together and seeing what they say, they in their own right have a conversation. Most influentially he talks about two opposites colliding in a dialectical way and a new meaning emerging – “the third meaning” – applying this to my work, I have brought together natural landscape imagery with imagery of environmental issues, on their own they could be very separate, the beautiful land that’s still left and the areas that are evidently affected by environmental issues, however a third meaning arises when put together, it highlights the fact that this natural landscape exists in the same world as the harm and is suffering because of human neglect, the work is then showcasing what could be lost if it is overlooked and ignored and exposes the viewer to the causes of this depletion.
3. Keith Arnutt – “Miss Grace’s Lane” – Keith Arnutt’s series Miss Grace’s Lane parodies the work of landscape artist Samuel Palmer. Applying this influence to my work, My paintings partly rely on parody in that in order for my concepts to be present, they rely on an assumption on the part of the viewer about what the traditional representation of a beautiful natural landscape is. When I talk about people’s nostalgia for stereotypically beautiful landscapes, I am talking about aesthetically pleasing paintings of a scene of natural beauty, unpolluted and unspoiled. People cling on to these images of the unharmed land and hang them in their houses etc. overlooking the fact that in reality, our world is far more polluted and experiencing different kinds of environmental harm. My work challenges traditional sublime landscape paintings also, not only in the format of the landscape and the challenged perspectives but in the fact that it contrasts the natural landscape with scenes of environmental damage. The fact that the work contains imagery of natural landscape beauty acts as a signifier for the viewer to pick up on the fact that the beautiful land in the image is there firstly to attract them to the image and secondly for that attraction to develop into exposure to the negative environmental toll.
Revisiting the work of Keith Arnatt and Relating it to my Own
4. Dexter Dalwood – I previously looked at the work of Dexter Dalwood in the context of researching an artist that painted from collages. I revisited this work and started looking Dalwood’s work in terms of how each section is painted. The paintings evidently portray the different segments of the collages as I wanted my paintings to but you view the work as a whole image, something key to my work and a variety of different techniques are employed to render the image. Some of the work is expressive and other areas simple in it’s approach. Elements of the work are also realistic next to segments that are more painterly. Other techniques that are employed include the use of block colour, outlining, pattern and texture, simplifying shapes and silhouettes. The use of simple shapes and silhouettes is an interesting idea and one that I would like to explore within my work. These works are paintings, not copies of his collages and that is what I wanted from my work, to make paintings. His work also inspired me to research different ways of painting, different techniques of rendering an image, I researched artists such as George Seurat, Van gogh and Emil Nolde in terms of techniques and use of colour and applied their influences to my own work. This work also inspired me to combine a variety of techniques into the same image and produce a more complex and confident outcome.
5. Book: Painting of Modern Life – The Book “The painting of modern life” has helped me to understand the relationship between photography and painting and the concepts and ideas that emerge when you translate a photograph into a painting and apply them to my work. Mostly, I was encouraged to think about how the photographs I have been working from were insufficient and why I felt they should be translated into painting. The photographic collages, are many different images, all taken from different places and brought together, painting them allows them to exist in the same image and highlights the fact that these different images are not separate from each other, echoing the reality of our environment. The collaged images are repetitive and of a similar colour palette. I have painted them with a sense of vibrancy, an attraction making them harder to overlook, I have also employed different painting techniques to keep them fresh and keep peoples interest in each image as each is a different viewing experience. The images could be censored photographs, the photograph of natural beauty could in reality have been next to a power station or a cut down forest. My work confronts this and highlights the reality of our landscape.
https://gemmaschiebefineart3.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/painting-from-modern-life-1960s-to-now/
(this post was a variety of different posts but I have condensed it down to one for assessment purposes – hence it’s length)
GemmaSchiebeFineArt III 