Attached is the Powerpoint is created for my presentation on my influences & significant sources of ideas within my work ArtWork.pptx
Included below are screenshots of my work, with a short explanation of each one.
An overview of my practice:
The Scottish artist Ken Currie is an important influence for me. I admire the sense of menace in his figures, as well as his highly skilled brushwork, which I often examine closely in order to develop my own skills further. Below are a selection of his works which I have found to be influential on my practice.
Francis Bacon is a huge influence on my work. I admire him as a master colourist, and am in awe his skilled brushwork, with which he is, in my opinion, unparalleled in his ability to create a sense of motion within his work. His ability to distort his figures, while retaining their essential human quality is the key to appreciating his work, and has been a major influence on my practice, in trying to loosen up my work from a generalised reproduction of the human form, to something much more distorted and alien, while at the same time remaining recognisable as a figurative piece of work. Recently I was fortunate enough to see several of Bacon's work in real life at the Bacon/Moore show at the Ashmolean/Oxford, and it was educational to see how he made use of impasto techniques in many of his pieces.
In my work last year, my use of collage was integral to the painted figure itself, replacing elements of the body with collaged reproductions of machinery or other objects, for example atomic bombs in place of breasts, to create a sense of dislocation & alienation between the subject being represented and the viewer. This was in keeping with the overall theme of my practice, which references & critiques the place of the individual person within contemporary capitalist society, especially the effects of powerful social forces on people, for example the disjuncture between the imagery presented by advertising & the reality of mass over-consumption of products, especially foodstuffs, and their effect on the human body as seen in the epidemic of obesity currently affecting Western society.
Although I found this style of collage, replacing bodily elements, effective in creating an abject figuration, I wanted to extend the range of possible uses of collage within my practice, from being solely elemental to include use as a motif creating a visual narrative within the work. The four slides below demonstrate this concept within my previous and current work. The first two slides are examples of work from last year, and show the use of collage solely as a figurative element. Below that is a current piece of work, in which the collage elements are repeated down the side of the canvas, and act as a prompt to reference the overall theme of the work.
This piece below is a commentary on the role of illegal drugs and addiction in the sex-industry, and the destructive effect this produces in the lives of women caught up in that world. The work is intended to be displayed not by use of a standard canvas stretcher, but by creating an external frame somewhat larger that the width and height of the canvas itself. The canvas has brass eyelets punched into it at regular intervals along all four edges, and by use of elasticated cord, is stretched taught inside the frame in a similar manner to how animal hides are tanned. By doing this it creates a sense of something trapped and hung out for display, which is thematically in keeping with the narrative I am trying to create in the work.
Below is a close-up detail of the collaged motif used in the work -packaging from medication & prostitutes calling cards, which are intended to reference the theme of the work.
Here is an example, taken from my sketch book, showing collage being used both as elemental to the figuration, and also as a motif referencing the theme of the piece itself. At the same time I have made use of a Baconesque geometric background to provide a visually richer setting for the work. My earlier work in this style was grounded on distressed cardboard, which was effective as a reflection of the themes I was attempting to mediate -consumption, the transitory and disposable nature of the consumer society, and the extent to which human beings are themselves regarded as disposable elements within our current economic and social paradigm. However, this year, I have moved the ground from cardboard over to canvas, and therefore it is essential that the background to each piece is more carefully considered and developed than previously, in order to avoid the work appearing flat and under-developed.
Another example of the attempt to shift the use of collage from bodily element to recurrent motif.
Sketchbook ideas for possible future development.
This is another idea I have worked on in my sketch-book. In the block of flats I live in, drug addicts often use the car-parks to consume the drugs they are dependent on, and as a result they litter the floor with the packaging detritus from their using. I thought to produce several small canvases decorated with the discarded wrappings from their products. I painted one half of the piece brown, to refer to the black market heroin they use, and the other half white for crack, and glued on top the cling film & cigarette papers which the drug-dealers use to wrap up their wares.Intended to be produced on small 6" x 5" canvases, the idea was to attach one to each side of the external frame which is to be used to stretch the main piece as described above.
*****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
[These slides were intended to give an brief impression of the direction my practice is following, and my primary artistic influences, & the subjects I am trying to mediate in my work. As my work progresses over the course of this year, I will continue to update this blog with further examples of the pieces I make, along with discussion of their conceptual foundation & influences; hopefully the better to demonstrate the successes & failures of my ideas as I put them into practice, and thereby be better able to see what works, & why.]
No comments:
Post a Comment