Summative Assessment: Key Points for Presentation

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.

Robert Bateman: Contrasts

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.

John Akomfrah – Vertigo Sea

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

Miss Grace’s Lane 1986-7 Keith Arnatt 1930-2008 Presented by the artist’s estate 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T13164

Miss Grace’s Lane 1986-7 Keith Arnatt 1930-2008 Presented by the artist’s estate 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T13154

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.

Revisiting the Work of Dexter Dalwood

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)

Painting from Modern Life: 1960s to Now: Analysing quotes in comparison to my work

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. Within my work, I am painting from a collage of many different photographs and reinventing it as a painting. I was struggling to put this into words and this book has helped clarify my ideas.

“In a Painting based on a photograph, the very act of remaking infers that the photograph was not sufficient” – (Herbert, Pg 43)

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 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.

“You can’t take a painting as with a photograph, you make a painting” – (Bakargiev, Pg.43)

I have come to realise that mindlessly copying a photograph may be skilful but doesn’t change the image in terms of it’s impact or concept apart from giving it a sense of importance as you have chosen it to paint. Making a painting takes a lot of decisions and it is important to allow the painting to tell you what it needs.

“Photography is commonly used as an accurate means of picturing the world, these artists confronted photographic images as a way of questioning the means by which we represent reality” –

This quote made me think about how a photograph is dubbed to be an accurate representation of our world, a real image. When in reality, an image of a beautiful landscape could be highly censored. It looks picturesque and beautiful but in reality there could have been a polluting power station or a cut down forest just next to it. My work addresses this.

“creating inspiring paintings that reinvent our images of the world”

I have reinvented my images, through use of colour and painting techniques, adding an attractiveness and vibrancy that draws in the viewer and exposes them to the reality that our beautiful natural world that people hold nostalgia for exists in the same image as environmental harm. I have reinvented the image to say more to the viewer.

“their paintings not only addressed the world in which they lived but also the phenomenon of how it was represented”

Throughout my practice, I have been working with ideas surrounding how the world is represented. This quote made me think about how I realised that images of environmental harm were easy to overlook and that I had to think of a new way to represent the world that highlighted the beauty that was being lost and the damage that was being done. When an issue doesn’t necessarily directly affect you it is easy to ignore and representing the harm as a miserable negative aspect of the world captured the attention of no one. Changing how it was represented and exploring an attraction and vibrancy to the work and contrasting it with the beautiful land people cling onto and don’t overlook definitely is more successful.

“Ultimately, rather than receiving a death sentence from the camera’s invention, painting encompasses photography to redefine and extend it’s conceptual reach”

The fact that I have painted these images, gives them a sense of importance in itself, I have chosen these as a worthy subject to depict. The images didn’t stop me painting them, they allowed me to reimagine them and give the viewer a sense of the different elements of our environment. I painted them to make them more poignant, to give the images an attraction that couldn’t be overlooked and therefore conceptually making them stronger than the image itself.

David Hockney: Landscape Paintings

David Hockney’s Landscape paintings are highly influential to my practice. The paintings are almost split into sections and different areas, which is relational to my work. Each section of field or grass is rendered with a different pattern or texture. There are many different approaches to applying paint and experimenting with colour within this work. Some areas are painted in stripes, others in dashes and various forms of mark making and pattern. Also, the use of both complementary and harmonious colours are employed in parts of the work. For example, there are green fields over-layed with red stripes in some areas, other fields are over-layed with yellow stripes etc.

This work will definitely inspire my painting techniques and approach to my practice progressing towards my 9th Painting. I have worked with various types of mark making including dashes and horizontal line work. This work inspires me to incorporate the use of stripes, work on top of colour with either their harmonious or complementary colour and to experiment with mark making in directions I haven’t previously explored. Also, there are quite a few coloured outlines in the work which I could employ to outline different segments of my paintings.

Vincent Van Gogh – Line Mark Making

Post-impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh’s technique of painting an image in many small lines/dash like marks is one I can definitely take influence from and incorporate into my series of paintings. Some of the rhythmic brushstrokes are uniformly placed in one direction and others more random and sporadic, evident in his piece “Starry Sky”. Both approaches to mark making are influential to my practice and techniques that I would like to experiment with within my degree show paintings.

“Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better,” “Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.” – Vincent Van Gogh 1874

The above quote by Vincent Van Gogh really resonates with me. Van Gogh talks about how you have to go out into the environment in order to understand it and articulate it to the viewer with paint. I have been visiting various sites of environmental harm throughout my practice and areas of natural beauty and it has definitely aided me in portraying this imagery. Van Gogh uses a lot of harmonious colours within his mark making, incorporating different colours into the mark making is something I must consider. I will experiment with working with these marks in uniform directions both horizontally and vertically as well as working on an area with marks included in different directions.

Henri Matisse: Colour and Marks

Henri Matisse’s work is influential to my practice both in terms of colour and in terms of mark making. Each piece that I make for the degree show will demonstrate a variety of different techniques and different approaches to painting, keeping it fresh and less repetitive for both me as the artist and the viewer. There is a vibrancy to Matisse’s work, the colour palette is bright and attractive. I want to experiment with combining a level of brightness and vibrancy with a textural pattern and mark making. The brush strokes within the work are short block dashes of colour. I want to experiment with incorporating this kind of mark into my work.

Another observation of his work is the fact that the white of exposed canvas is visible within his paintings, he employed this technique to create a light-filled atmosphere in his Fauve paintings. This is something I could think about experimenting with also, leaving some of the white background showing through in places, however I don’t want the work to look unfinished. Matisse has mastered this technique and achieved a finished look without painting the whole surface. I am going to paint very intuitively under all my contextual influences throughout the rest of my practice as a degree student and let the paintings direct me and the image tell me how to render it.

Revisiting the Work of Dexter Dalwood

I have previously looked at the work of Dexter Dalwood in the context of researching an artist that painted from collages. As advised by my tutor, I am now revisiting his work. I am now looking at Dalwood’s work in terms of how each section is painted. The paintings evidently portray the different segments of the collages as I want my paintings to 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.

Mostly, Dalwood’s work inspired me to think about how each painted element of my work relates, contrasts or reacts to the surrounding segments. His work encourages me to think about my paintings as a whole as well as considering each segment individually. I am also inspired to combine a variety of techniques into the same image and produce a more complex  and confident outcome.

Revisiting the work of Keith Arnatt and Relating it to my Own

Previously, I have looked at the work of Keith Arnatt, his series “Miss Grace’s Lane” in particular both in terms of imagery associated with environmental harm and a natural landscape being apparent in the same image but also in terms of the fact that Keith Arnatt’s work parodies the work of Landscape artist Samuel Palmer. This is something I am revisiting. I need to apply this to my work and consider my concepts in relation to this parody.

Miss Grace’s Lane 1986-7 Keith Arnatt 1930-2008 Presented by the artist’s estate 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T13152

Miss Grace’s Lane 1986-7 Keith Arnatt 1930-2008 Presented by the artist’s estate 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T13164

Miss Grace’s Lane 1986-7 Keith Arnatt 1930-2008 Presented by the artist’s estate 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T13154

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.

Mark Rothko: Block Colour and Shape

Abstract Expressionist Painter Mark Rothko creates simple compositions incorporating the use of flat block colour. Even though the layers in his painting are built up and they aren’t opaque blocks of colour, his work made me think about incorporating block colour into my own paintings.

His work inspires me to experiment with simplifying down the components of sections of my painting into simple shapes and painting them in in block colour. I feel as if simplified areas contrasted with more realistic segments could make for a highly interesting visual outcome. I want to experiment with incorporating block colour into my work and as Rothko has done, think about how the colours work next to each other. His work is far more complex than it seems. However, I think I will work with hard edges and definite blocks rather than as if the edges are bleeding and blending in Rothko’s work.

Malcolm Morley: Postcards into Painting

Malcolm Morley is a prime example of an artist that adapts, develops and reinterprets a piece from a photographic resource, in this case both photographs and post cards into a successful painting. Using the initial image as a source of inspiration and as a starting point he adopts different techniques including levels of abstraction and distortion, brightening colours and adding in new elements. I am working with adapting my collages when translating them into painting and it is undoubtedly useful to look at how other artists have approached this.

I don’t necessarily want to change the image within my work, more adapt how it is painted. The above images give me an insight into how I can differentiate between sections of my paintings, for example a more realistically painted element next to a painterly and more abstract approach heightens the realistic element and makes it stand out. His work inspires me to incorporate a variety of different techniques into one image and develop the image by looking at the section next to it and deciding what technique or approach reacts well with it and will be appropriate next to it.

Luc Tuymans: Surface, Brush Stroke Direction

Luc Tuymans’s work was brought to my attention in my feedback recently. I have been researching art movements and artworks that could give me ideas of how to approach painting my pieces. I am just starting to experiment with the idea of approaching each painting I make with different painting techniques and so researching different ways in which artists have approached making a painting is influential. The surface of Luc Tuyman’s work is a unified whole, there is a flatness to the work. This is due to the majority of the brush marks in the work being painted in the same direction. This is definitely something that I could think about, painting parts of my work with all the brush marks going in the same direction.

The colour palette is very neutral and minimal. The colour and tonal difference between the base colour and highlights and shadows is very subtle which is also something I could experiment with, achieving this kind of softness and subtlety. Thinking about the direction of my marks will definitely be something I explore within my series of degree show pieces.