#dart1120

expansive painting update

Now that I have created all my layers of clingfilm, I am exploring ways to document the final piece. I am torn between just photographing the end product of layered hands or videoing a performance style piece where layers are added. I think there is something quite nice about watching all the layers being added, and individual handprints dissolving and combining into one abstract, messy skin print. But I also like the ambiguity of the final result. Not sure! 

Left: Carmen Herrera, A City (1948)

Right: Elba Obregon, Fortune Cookies (2020)

For my final reductive painting, I decided to follow in the style of Carmen Herrera and complete a geometric interpretation of a part of my assemblage. I focused on the three fortune cookies because I was so intrigued by their shape and I wanted to explore what it would look like to reduce them to solely geometric shapes of semi circles and triangles. It almost felt like the skeleton of the fortune cookie which is the concept I decided to run with for my reductive painting.

The painting by Herrera that most inspired my final reductive painting is A City, (1948). What I loved about this painting is that, as someone from New York City, I immediately knew that her image was of a city skyline because it was informed by my own lived experience, and my familiarity with the visual of a city sky line at night. In a similar way, I hoped that my reductive painting would be able to do a similar thing of “ringing a bell” for those of you who already saw my original assemblage, and then could recall the image of the fortune cookies even though this new painting is technically just shapes.

Playing with the idea of memory and how the brain connects shapes to things that are familiar to us was an intriguing experience for me as a painter, and hopefully a unique experience for viewers of my reductive painting. When it comes to art, interpretation is in the eye of the viewer, so it makes sense that when we see something that is not obvious or clear, we try to make sense of it in our brains with things that we do know. (Think: Trying to make shapes of clouds as kids!)

Finally, I want to speak a little more about why I chose the details I did for this piece. First off, the pink background was meant to emulate the pink color of the paper from my original assemblage. I did not want to change this as it was already a solid color that did not draw attention away from the fortune cookies themselves. Secondly, I debated whether or not I wanted to paint the entire semi-circles black or if I wanted to leave areas where the white and pink could be seen. I ultimately decided to do the latter as I wanted the painting to look like the skeletons of fortune cookies (if they had one), to truly reduce it as much as possible. Lastly, I decided to round the edges of the canvas because I wanted the painting to resemble the piece of paper in the original assemblage. This also unexpectedly emulated Carmen Herrera’s A City which also features rounded edges.

Reductive painting 

One of my ideas is patterns which is inspired from the installation of the artist Laura Owens. To create it, I used a thread roll moving across the paper. By looking at the result, I wanted to create reductive painting using the minimal effort, less materials, and smaller size of paper. 

Sculpture from Athens, hair added by myself 

Week 7: Individual Assemblage Painting

For this simple painting I decided to just focus on the general shapes and colours of one of the assemblages. I liked the circular shapes of the white trinket tray and the three paint splotches so I decided to focus on this. 

I have realised now that my experimentation with the expansive painting is strongly influenced by Joan Ross’ work, and I think I’ll continue along this path. Here I’ve mixed the bodily nature of cartoon with the stoicism of the photorealistic, which I feel like has made an interesting result. Making only part of the figure cartoon-like is something I’d like to keep working on.