RESEARCH FILE
- https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/julian-bell-contemporary-art-and-the-sublime-r1108499
- Arya, R. (2013). Bill Viola and the Sublime. [online] Tate.org.uk. Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/rina-arya-bill-viola-and-the-sublime-r1141441.
The Art Story. (n.d.). The Sublime in Art – Modern Art Terms and Concepts. [online] Available at: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/the-sublime-in-art/.
The sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.
Nsw.gov.au. (2013). Sublime: the pleasure of the overwhelming :: Art Gallery NSW. [online] Available at: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/calendar/sublime/.
Vivien Suter — Tintin’s Sofa exhibition
- “In 2005, a tropical storm destroyed large parts of Panajachel and flooded Suter’s studio. Rather than seeing damage in the canvases, which were caked in mud and stained with water marks, Suter saw her work developing in response to, and in harmony with, its environment. “
- Since then, she has embraced the unpredictability of her adopted home, actively encouraging the intrusion of the elements into her practice. Her unprimed canvases are left outdoors to absorb the traces of falling leaves, rain water, dirt, passing animals and the marks of her dogs, Bonzo, Nina and Tintin, imprinting the daily life of the forest onto the surface of each work.
- For this exhibition, Suter fills the galleries with her delicate but powerful paintings, hanging them in an immersive cacophony which mirrors the canopy of the rainforest: suspended, draped, overlapping and organic. Composed individually but hung collectively, one canvas reveals the next, creating an ethereal record of the passage of time and forming a permeable membrane between nature and civilisation. Removed from the tropical setting in which they were conceived, the paintings bear witness to their unique environment at a time of renewed focus on this vital but increasingly vulnerable ecological resource.
Vivian Suter, January 17th – April 5th, 2020
I find this inspiring when thinking about my FMP, encouraging me to think more deeply about how I can use the literal environment around me within my portrayal of it. The way her work has been hung is equally interesting, as I walked around the xhibition i felt immersed in the watery bright colours and bold shapes. Wondering how I could present my work in a way that will affect the viewer more viscerally.
Athanasios Argianas: Hollowed Water
- I found his short movie the most interesting, successfully creating a sense of peace and aesthetic harmony. Using both nature and man made objects.
- Furthermore, his use of poetry within his sculptures really added a sense of depth to the work. Inspiring me to think about how language can be utilised within fine art and the additional messages they may provide.
Athanasios Argianas, January 17th – April 5th, 2020
Bruce McLean, February 5th – August 23rd, 2020
Crowd, February 20th – April 4th
Patrick Caulfield
“still lifes and interiors, carefully composed with thick black lines and even fields of colour. Human figures are rarely depicted, but tell-tale signs of human presence abound in Caulfield’s enigmatic world. Often, it is impossible to resolve perspective in his painting, an effect mirrored by the depiction of hidden spaces: jugs, pots, windows and blind corners.”
https://www.waddingtoncustot.com/artists/patrick-caulfield/
When viewing Caulfields somewhat melancholy outcomes the viewers’ eyes experience an immediate sense of ease, comfort and harmony. This is primarily due to both Caulfields’ limited palette and use of negative space, giving the observers eyes a chance to settle into the deep blocks of solid colour as they are gently guided around the painting through his straight / often parallel lines. Though Caulfield mainly works within the domestic sphere, I wanted to successfully convey an aesthetic experience and atmosphere within an outside context. Coercing architectural structures and brutalist architecture alongside the human experience of these places. Caulfield too is originally inspired by figurative forms, but his overall aim is to depict an experience rather than a state of reality. This intention is most obvious through his very flat paintings and lack of tonal range, creating a dreamy style that I believe relates directly to pop art culture. Critic Dexter Dalwood examines how “Caulfield’s control and understanding of colour combined with his skillful incorporation of the black were his greatest innovations in terms of the construction of modern image”(DALWOOD, DEXTER. “Patrick Caulfield: London.” The Burlington Magazine 155, no. 1327 (2013): 721-22. Accessed January 31, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24241030.) . Influencing me to experiment with bringing together both a sense of flatness and 3 dimensionality within a piece, wanting to explore whether this would bring a slightly more uncomforting experience for the observer.
Read the book ‘Joy’ by OSHO
Quotes that have resonated with me and my project:
- “You can paint in two ways. You can paint to compete with other painters, where you want to be the greatest painter in the world. You want to be a Picasso or a Van Gogh; then your painting will be second rate because your mind is not interested in painting itself, it is interested in being the first, the greatest painter in the world. You are not going deep into the art of painting. You are not enjoying it, you are only using it as a stepping stone, you are on an ego trip and the problem is that to really be a painter you have to drop the ego completely. To really be a painter the ego has to be put aside. Only then can existence flow through you, only then can your hands and your fingers and your brush be used as vehicles. Real beauty is never created by you but only through you”
- “Modern paintings without titles and many paintings are even without frames because existence has no frame. When you look from your window you see the sky framed but the frame exists in the window not in the sky the sky has no frame.”
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/daoi/hd_daoi.htm
Turps gallery
Saw and made sketches from David Hephers work, the sheer scale of the piece, taking up a whole wall made you feel threatened and consumed by the piece. Pervading above you and almost invading a sense of personal space and comfortability. Sketching the repeated pattern of the council concrete flats I found interesting. Furthermore his layering of paint, and a tiny photograph of the image of the apartments. I found this contrast of scale from tiny to huge fascinating, leading me to reflect on how I might want to present my work. Since we are both inspired by industrial architecture. He draws his lines bowed, making the piece seem continuous, stretching above and beyond the painting itself. I’d like my final piece to have this similar sense of dominance and purpose. Furthermore, his use of sand concrete and oil have inspired me to consider a more experimental use of material that mirrors the subject matter in which I am drawing/painting from.
David Hepher, Keith Coventry and Jock Mcfadyen, February 22nd – March 22nd, 2020
“Hepher denies that his paintings are intended to be seen as overt political or social comments on the way people are forced to live in the inner cities. ‘Inevitably, in painting these buildings questions about society that interest me arise, but it is not because of these questions that I paint the flats. I have always painted houses, or housescapes. A house, or more symbolically a home, is one of the earliest images a child paints. In many ways it represents, particularly for the English, the face people present to the world, at the same time providing a refuge from too close a contact with other people. All the owner’s personality is revealed in his home. This is why I only paint residential flats – they have a soul that glamorous office architecture doesn’t have. In spite of their beauty I don’t want to paint the sleek and shiny city blocks. I think there is a danger of that becoming incestuous, too much like art celebrating art. I like best to work from council blocks, preferably stained and eroded by the dirt and the weather, where the facial appearance is continually changed by the people who live there, their comings and goings, and the changing decor. I would like to think that the pictures could make people look differently at the flats around them, to see beauty in objects that they normally dismiss as ugly.’ He acknowledges that the hard-edged geometry of such buildings allows him to pursue certain formal interests in his paintings, ‘I wouldn’t be painting them without abstract art and while drawing them I am constantly reminded of the grid structure of Agnes Martin or Mondrian’, but is more concerned with attempting to record as accurately as possible what he sees when confronting a specific building than with exploiting its formal possibilities.”
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hepher-albany-flats-t02404
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/12/the-grid-as-a-checkpoint-of-modernity
I noticed an interesting parallel in interest between Caulfield and Hepher, both focused on a domestic space whilst only implying the presence of the humans who are inhabiting these spaces.
Articles and sites i’ve visited exploring Mathematics, Agnes Martin, Mondrian and the grid
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/mathematics/the-mathematical-problem-of-mondrians-paintings/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/01/agnes-martin-review-tate-modern-grid-paintings
Art in modern architecture, by Eleanor Bittermann, published in New York 1955
https://libsearch.arts.ac.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=15253&query_desc=
Geometric Abstraction, by Collischan, Judy; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery; University of Nebraska.
Victor Willing
Benet Spencer
Within Spencer’s work he considers architecture as an emblematic form. Understanding the processes of production and wanting to create his own settings from these processes. Inspiring me to think about stripping back buildings and architectural work to raw geometry, line and pattern.
However, Spencer uses collaging within his work, a medium I am yet to work with and am definitely open to. Interested to see how different images interact. Although, I do definitely adopt his technique of layering, something I am constantly developing and trying to push myself to achieve.
I also like how his digital prints bring a degree of illusionism, exploring the nature of space and how depth can be created by both a sense of flatness intermingled with the 3 dimensional. This is something I’d like to explore further, pushing myself to really collaborate with these contrasting ideas to see their outcome; hopefully offering a new perspective.
“Colour registration is a primary concern, along with the language and process of painting, and questions around how architectural language can be utilised within painting and drawing as part of a methodology for representing form and space. The varied densities of painted surface evolve as part of several discrete processes, and through this interest in facture, the resulting work addresses questions around what a painting is, as much as how a subject can be described.”
Isolation thoughts
Being in isolation has led me to watch a number of videos of other people in quarantine across the globe. Leading me to question the following:
- Fears over the economy
- Earth gaining some power back, the earth having a chance to breathe
- The fragility of our power here on earth
- alienation
- Self reflection, what is society? is the system in place beneficial?, are we dominated and controlled?
- Loneliness, how i can depict this through my architectural work
- Is this the way things are supposed to be?
The authors of culture fill in the blanks of our personality, creating a linguistic hallucination we call society that makes us act and behave in certain ways. Capitalist culture is damaging and leads us into a certain path in life with a never ending goal of consumerist culture.
Terrence mckenna (controversial philosopher) “culture is not your friend” — are we restricted by cultural values and expectations?
Photographer Paul Talling
Francisco Ibanez Hantke
https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_market/art_101_geometric_abstraction-5788