Constellation – Personal Overview

Choosing Sonic Art for my Constellation studies has definitely been beneficial to my wider research. Despite being slightly unsure about the difference between music and art at the beginning, I have found the concepts involved very interesting and I now have a growing intrigue with sound art. Perhaps I could involve myself in a project in which I work between visual art – such as painting and drawing – and sound art, this way I could bounce the two off of each other.

Overall I have found it really quite challenging as Sonic Art is a subject way out of my comfort zone (despite my love for both art and music.) However, by immersing myself into the work of different sonic artists I have managed to bridge the gap between the two, and it was just as peculiar as I expected it to be. I have constantly been thinking about how different music and art are from each other, and yet people always say that the concept of Art encompasses drama, visual art, music, performance art – everything which represents an emotional or thoughtful expression. I have come to think that a songwriter/musician will have a completely different approach to what they are creating than the approach an artist will have to their work. It seems that the aim of a songwriter is much more literal and perhaps slightly more structured than, for example a painter’s approach towards a painting.

Surrealism – Film Making vs Visual Art

I have a tendency to include films in my contextualization, I dont actively choose to, I just get an idea in my head and sometimes it will remind me of a particular scene or concept in a movie that affected me somehow. Personally I think there is very little difference between film making and visual art so it’s no wonder I enjoy combining them.

The first film that popped into my head when I decided to study plant life was Disney’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in which there is a scene where Alice discovers a group of flowers who have faces and limbs like human beings. They begin to talk to her, each with their own personality that was cleverly fitting to their species. They are mostly snide and judgmental and begin to pick on Alice, eventually leaving her to cry alone. This scene frightened me as a child (in fact most of that film frightened me) but that scene still affects me today. Aren’t flowers meant to be lovely and beautiful? Or can they be just as cruel as humans? This surreal idea of removing the line between nature and humanity is both creepy and interesting and I want to embrace it completely.

Another painter whose work I discovered in BayArt is Piet Groenendijk who, in 2013, made very modest little still life oil paintings of a dinner table set up with a little plastic dog placed next to the cutlery. His mark making is so obscure that the dog and the cutlery have the same blurry consistency, therefore the dog doesn’t even look plastic, it just looks like a shrunken dog that’s gotten lost and is wondering around on a dinner table. I really took a ‘shine’ to these paintings – (relevance to that reference coming up shortly) – because of their simplicity and gentle humour. I also liked that the artist didnt go mad and paint loads of different toy animals in different mundane scenes; it was subtle.

So, this reminded me of Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’ (there you go) which I have recently finished reading. I have not yet seen Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of it but i’m guessing he includes the very important hedge animals which come to life and attack the main characters.

Here is a quote on the uber-creepy hedge animals that I think very aptly describes man’s disrespect for nature: ‘It had always seemed slightly perverted to him to clip and torture a plain old hedge into something that it wasn’t. Along one of the highways in Vermont there had been a hedge billboard on a high slope overlooking the road, advertising some kind of ice cream. Making nature peddle ice cream, that was just wrong. It was grotesque.’

It is this idea of taking an object that is not meant to have life and giving it life that I am exploring (hence the plastic dog and the hedge animal link). I must somehow bring my very intimate drawings of flowers and other plants to life, perhaps i’ll blow them up large to a menacing scale, that always seems to work…

Paolo Porpora and Emma Bennett – Strange and Interesting Still Life Paintings

Porpora (1617-1673) was born and trained in Naples and later worked in Rome, but was heavily influenced by Dutch flower painting. His work seems to have a twisted edge to it that I find intriguing.

Whilst visiting the Cardiff National museum I came across an oil painting by Porpora titled ‘Still Life with Snake, Frogs, Tortoise and a Lizard’ and I was struck by its somewhat gruesome appearance. Not like any other still life I have seen before, it is extremely dark (like most traditional still life paintings) yet the creatures and objects in the foreground are not particularly well lit. Therefore, from a distance I could see the glistening skin of the reptiles but not much else, I had to move closer to see the foreground. I personally think it is vulgar (which just seems to be Porpora’s painting style) which is why it is so striking. It seems to show little concern for the capturing beauty of an object, which is typically the still life ideal. Overall it was the authenticity of Porpora’s painting that made me fall in love with it. Below is a photograph I took of it.

(I also find the contrast between the wetness of the reptiles and the soft, dryness of the flowers rather interesting. Man, he showed sensitivity toward what he painted!) Here is a close up example of how softly Porpora painted his flowers.

I also recently made a visit to BayArt as I read on their website there was a contemporary still life exhibition showing. I personally did not find much there that inspired or excited me that much, despite the relevance it had to my work. For example I found and studied Emma Bennett’s 2009 oil paintings titled ‘Hollowed (Unhallowed)’ and ‘Watching the Night’ which caught my eye as they had a similar sense of darkness and repulsion that is displayed in Porpora’s painting, but I wasn’t quite as awed. Here are some photographs of them.

I reckon it’s probably down to their painting styles; Bennett’s paint looked very smooth and clean, almost precious, whereas Porpora’s paint literally looked dirty and slimy, accompanying the slimy reptillion subject matter. This has led me to be more considerate about my choice of materials.

Joseph Nigg – Flower Painting

Joseph Nigg (1782-1863) was an Austrian painter who specialised in painting on porcelain. Nigg was born and studied in Vienna and worked as a flower painter in a porcelain factory. The Vienna factory had perfected a wide range of colours and great luminosity, harboring almost unrivalled technological skill in the early 19th century.

During this period flower painting became immensly popular as the arts were appealing more and more to the middle-class, therefore Nigg, among other flower painters, gained considerable reputation. Nigg specialised in porcelain painting but also made work in oil, water colours and pastels. One can study the work of Nigg and understand that the high definition and fineness of his painting style most likely resulted from his time spent working in the factory, where discipline and even perfectionism would have been expected. Here are some images of his works.

On a visit to the Cardiff National museum I came across a vase painted by Nigg in 1816. I was struck by the intensity of the colours within the flowers, how saturated they looked. Yet it did not look tacky; despite Nigg’s bold use of colour, it still looked delicate and considerate. Below is a close up photograph I took of it.

In this piece he displayed the typical still-life painter technique of painting the brightly lit objects over a dark backgriund to enhance their visibility. I admire this piece compositionally; it is completely full of flowers of all different species, ranging in size shape and colour, and yet he has placed them so that there is harmony between them despite the difference in colour and shape.

Overall, I truly think Nigg’s ‘Vase’ is my specific chosen piece for my Subject work this year. Out of all the artists I have considered it is this piece by Nigg that interests and inspires me most. Perhaps this is because I have been able to study it, move around it, photograph and draw it in person.

From the Summer Project to Now – Second Year

Over the summer we were given a brief which involved creating work that was portable and compact, an example of an artist working in this way would be Marcell Duchamp’s use of suitcases as displays for his work, which was very small. These pieces were not unlike museum displays, and this was the theme we were to focus on over the summer. We were each given a small square sketchbook to draw in, write in, collage, fold etc. Essentially anything we wanted to do with them, as long we had something to focus on. Thinking about museums I visited the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford and found myself thinking about heritage, religion, superstition, rituals, remedies, spirituality, and how all these things things can be manifested or proven through objects. The Pitt Rivers (being a vast collection of artefacts from different periods and different places around the world) seemed like the perfect place to observe how all these things are preserved and displayed.

 

I found myself staring at the masks they have on display, all with different purposes and meanings, most of them very scary.

As much as I am interested in masks, I did not see myself going down such a route with my work for this year. What I felt truly inspired by was the trip I had taken with my family back in April to Pembrokeshire. Now i’m from Somerset, and there are undoubtedly some of the most beautiful landscapes in the Somerset countryside, but I soon learned they can only be matched by the untouched beauty of the Welsh countryside. There is something so rugged about the Welsh landscape, and i’m a sucker for a good view, and the beauty of the places we visited stayed with me and resonated in me like no other place I’d been before. Perhaps it was the sense of nostalgia I felt from spending time with my family that made this trip so emotional for me, but I knew it would somehow feed my future work. I felt inspired by landscapes like these.

In June I went to an exhibition at the Cardiff National museum which was based on the Welsh heritage, the Welsh landscape, the poetry it inspired, and the art work that sprung from that poetry. Allen Ginsberg (a famous American poet) was shown in a recording of him excitedly reciting a poem he wrote in response to a time he went walking in the Welsh Countryside whilst under the influence of LSD. His words almost seemed illustrated by Ceri Richard’s painting titled ‘The Cycle of Life’. Here is a picture I wasnt allowed to take of it.

This painting was in fact inspired by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who also recited Wales’ beauty.

I was in awe of the giant paintings by Richards and Graham Sutherland: the way they represented a landscape yet were so undefined and abstract, the use of colour and the expressive, flowing marks. I loved this idea for a way of working – simply recreating landscapes but containing their beauty – but I could not foresee how I could approach this idea without outright copying Ceri Richards’ style, so I decided to take another direction for my work that would still show my admiration and respect for nature.

I began studying flowers and realised how much I liked zooming in on separate parts of nature. Here are some drawinjgs I made.

I then began to define this particular style when I came back to uni in September. I like working with colouring pencils, they have a child-like laborious qualiy that looks so innocent, but in an ironic way (as I found myself drawing flowers in a way that made them look rather menacing – this I liked).

Overall, that is the journey my work has taken so far. I am happy with the theme I have solidified and I hope to see it bloom throughout the year (pun intended).