Sunday 29 May 2016

The Foreground as a Tool

Something I have been considering in my paintings is the foreground. In this image you can see I have added a foreground level to the earlier landscape. The motivation for this has been a number of factors:

1) The experience is important to my work. I want the viewer to feel they are in the space even if the detail isn't photographic and the colours have been effected by the process of working from ink jet printed photographs. The use of the foreground element makes it seem as if they are lower behind the plants and isn't an angle you would normal see unless you actually got down in the field and saw that perspective.

2) Following on from this it's this angle that is so different from the normal framing of a landscape photograph. You would not ordinarily have a focus on the foreground because it's what's out beyond that would normally be the focus for the image. This framing is important to the feeling of presence.

3) The use of foreground is also a cinematic tool, and is important because the source material for the image is a still from a film I shot in the English country. Using the foreground can be a tool to draw attention to this level or when referring to the background be used "to point out a significant relationship between the two subjects." (https://collegefilmandmediastudies.com/cinematography/). This foreground is something we recoginse through the medium of film and points out connections between painting and film that I hope to develop in my practice.

This opens out important relationships in my work between the history of landscape painting and the cinematography that will help guide my visual language.


Tuesday 10 May 2016

Light Effects in my Painting

I am very interested in how the light through the camera lens has been polarized or caught and then this has been reduced my the printing process. You can see in the close up image of my latest painting that I have used a light yellow to highlight this effect. At this stage this is very much an experiment but I am pleased with the results. They are on some level real but yet because you can study them through this video still they are unreal. This is not something you could permanently fix your eye on in a field, it would change and probably be too bright to study, but here we can. Does this create a fantastical experience? Interestingly I had a 'happy accident' here when I left a thin gap between the yellow and the white and it has emphasized the leaves, almost making them shimmer further. I will be doing more experiments with such effects. Here is the painting, which is nearly finished.