Practitioners Statement – Toby Lattimore
MA Fine Art - University of Hertfordshire
The recording of nature has been a key
element in my work as it has evolved during my MA. Initially I shot short films
on walks in the country, playing with perspective and the angel of the camera.
I was looking for an image that was immersive and, as if to emphasis this, I
found a point of view that was unusual, as if seen from an animal’s
perspective, low down, either as a predator hunting or the prey hiding.
This brought up an emphasis on
foreground that I had not expected and created a series of classic cinematic
references; foreground, mid-ground and background levels in the actual
composition of the work. There was also a tension for the viewer as they became
the person in the field. This relationship for the viewer would change as I
developed the work, which I talk about later.
I produced
three largish oil paintings (150cmx100cm) after studying the stills from the
short film. The first was true to the original printout and I questioned how I
should handle the aspect of realism. I looked to other artists such as Peter
Doig to understand the genesis of the source material for a landscape painting
and that it can create a fantastical landscape.
The film also emphasised for me an
effect that ordinary still cameras tending to null and void. The white balance
levels of the film camera, a small digital handheld, fluctuated and as I
examined the stills I noticed that areas were ablaze and this changed the
physical manifestation of the plants within the fields. I became fascinated by
this and used it as a key element in the following paintings.
The second and third painting were more
concerned with how this light effected the flora of the scene and created brightly
lit landscapes of colour within the composition. But I was incorporating the
composition of the film still, including the sky and land and where they
connected. Three levels that actually were struggling against each other as I
decided to embolden the colours, moving away from photorealism and more towards
abstraction. These sections that were
concerned with the overexposure became morphed by the light, changing shape and
forming abstracted regions. This happened more so in the central plane of the
image.
At points on the print out of the
landscape, that I was working from, I could see a halo of yellow around the
plants and clouds and decided that I should try and emphasis these. I was
unsure if they were a result of just the film’s overexposure or that and a
combination of the relatively poor quality printout I was working from. I
realised though that I was viewing this landscape through a number of filters,
or lenses, which was contributing to making the source material in its own
right something quite removed from the reality of the original view. I embraced
this though as it seemed to engage with my growing interest in, and emphasis of,
how the light was being manipulated in the image. By allowing these interpretations,
or what you might call translations, of the original image I felt I was
expanding my understanding of the presence of the light in that field which I
had filmed in early winter and so on some level allowed me to engage with an
investigation that I felt could come to fruition through my painting.
I finished these paintings and moved to
a separate set of photographs, that I had been sent, which showed a food plane.
These were taken with the sun blazing down on the flooded land and I found the
light in the images interesting. Yet, I had not taken these myself and they
were not film stills resulting in there more traditional composition. The
yellow orange light of the sun fascinated me and I decided that I would work
larger and try to replicate one of the original landscape panorama format that
some of the photographs had been taken in. This was because this relationship
to the film process was part of the dialogue of the content of my work. The
painting I put together was 350cmx100cm.
I stood back from this original image
and did not really like what I saw. It was too conventional, the way the original
photographs were taken were too framed and less about the experience of being
there. But still the sun light was strong and I decided, looking back at my
first paintings, that I could use a halo effect but potentially in a more
abstracting way. I took a bold orange, a tone I could see in some of the glowing
edges of the land, and outline every single object. This flattened the work
into an amorphous sequence of orange shapes.
This ended up being cut into three
separate paintings as I decided to overlay some of the other photographs from
the series to create a foreground which had featured in the previous paintings,
a tool I was still interested in exploring. I then added the light halo, a
white transparent edge, to the trees that I had also used before, as if to
further enhance the study of light in the painting.
Figure 3- One of the Edge Diffraction
paintings – Oil on board 100cm x 50cm
In the end I was still dissatisfied
with these paintings as they seemed too busy. I wanted to focus down on the
aspects of the light and edge and so decided to take out the plants from the
original field film stills and began to sketch them separately. This prompted
me to consider how I could apply the light and the white, which had originally
been the high white balance levels in the film, became the thinned white oil
paint that I applied to these morphing shapes. These were now the sole focus
for a series of paintings I called the Edge Diffraction paintings. By adding
layers of transparent white I was creating my own light halos around the plants
and as if a side effect of this they shifted in and out of a plane that
vibrated with life. It felt as if I had discovered a three-dimensional quality
that had been lacking in the previous paintings. They felt purer, more minimal
and abstracted as a result of my research.
The manipulation of my original
landscapes had been inspired by the artist Peter Doig. His fantastical
landscapes, although set in reality, had an edgy mystery about them. The light
was exaggerated and the technique intense. I looked further into this and found
that it was Doig’s use of a range of photographic media in his work that really
interested me. In May 2015 Martin Gayford interviewed Doig who talked candidly
about this and went on to say:
"…to me it's
more interesting when it's not about simply copying, or making photorealism.
You see so many people using the photographic world in painting, and I would
say that 90 percent of the time it's so mundane. How do you transcend
that?"
GAYFORD, M. (2015) Memory Traces,
Apollo Art Magazine, New York
Doig is
saying here that the process of using a photographic image in your work is
something of a trap, which was something I needed to think carefully about. The
ease of simply copying an image can become mundane, potentially predictable.
The straight copy of a photo would replicate the photograph and what does this
achieve? He's not ruling every such image as mundane more that there is a
higher chance of it being so if you do a straight copy. I took this on board and felt it was an
important aspect of what I wanted to achieve in my paintings. This
detachment from the exactness of the original image either through memory or
reworking the image through other processes has created what could be called an
'imaginary place' because some of the elements of the work are unrealistic. So
my use of lenses i.e. the camera, printing process and then the paint itself
seem to fit this ideal.
Another artist who made me engage with
this dialogue of how to use photographic media in my work was George Shaw. Tom
Morton in issue 67 of Freeze Magazine in 2002 called George Shaw's paintings
"remembered landscapes". Morton describes a gritty environment in
which Shaw grew up and how the artist had returned to the haunts of his youth
to take photographs during his MA, at the Royal College of Art, in London.
These shots became the solid foundation for a series of paintings that were
stark in their photorealism, the landscapes grim suburban visas. Much like my original film of the fields had
for me.
What was apparent with Shaw’s chosen subject matter is
that the photographs he takes, in the first instance, are designed to be used
for his paintings. They are images which you wouldn't ordinarily photograph.
These locations are off the beaten track places that are functional, or areas
of the town in which you might not linger. They have a personal narrative with
I would begin to question in my own work.
Shaw’s current exhibition at the
National Gallery – My Back to Nature in which he depicts a series of forest
landscapes were particularly inspiring for me but in a different way; the way
he handles the paint. His use of line and form to create vertical vistas
resonated in my work and I was interested in his reduction of colour and
increasing presence of patches of darkness in the design. He was moving away
from his earlier pure photorealism to something more abstract, a process I was
very interested in my own work.
In an interview in 2013 shot at Galleri Andersson/Sandström in
Umeå, Sweden Ian McKeever talks about his process of painting.
He produces large abstract paintings that show a series of layers,
with an emphasis on space and form. He’s interested in a “loose amorphous
space” that has no exactness but “pulses”. I have begun to recognise this in my
Edge Diffraction Paintings and McKeever goes on to explain that he is trying to
create a feeling for each painting giving it an identity.
One of the systems that he uses is to pour the paint onto the
large unprepared canvas surface and he then builds up the layers. Although I do
not pour, the layers are important for me and have taken on a transparent value
like McKeever’s. I apply them one after the other once the paint has dried.
For McKeever the paintings that he believes work well are
the ones which try to deal with what it is to be human. He states that too many paintings are
about the paint but that there should be more of the painter within the work.
He says that he seeks the “The whole philosophy of self” when he paints and when
he looks at other people’s work, that “you are actually trying to declare
yourself as a human being and let it manifest itself through the form of
painting.”
I find this an interesting approach to painting and one I want to
try and incorporate into what I do, as yet I am unsure if this is possible. My
work takes from the fake, the artificial recording and the presence of light.
Where in this do I exist?
One thing
is for sure as I move forward with my research, after I complete my MA, is that
I must question my physical relationship to the actual paint and its
application. What do I want to express through the painting process? Should it
be more present? Or should the picture be more present and the paint merely a
device to create the dominant image? What is the physicality of the paint on
the actual canvas?
As I mentioned previously the viewer
relationship with the painting has changed. This is something I am interested
in playing with. In the first instance I had wanted to manipulate the viewer
into a position of place potentially that of the prey cowering in front of the
foreground or being in awe of its size. But now with the Edge Diffraction
paintings and the moving abstracting forms they present the viewer is unsure of
their location. We can see a landscape but it’s position or surrounding is
uncertain more, the objects move, their edges transitional.
With the halos, around features such as
flora, that have always featured in my recent paintings I have been fascinated
by light but potentially never questioned where this might exist, the space it
occupies. Maybe this development through abstracting and sketching the flora of
the scene will result in a better understand of this region, which not only the
viewer occupies, but the artist as well. In that way more of myself as McKeever
explains can be transferred into the work, something less recognisable and more
gestural, an extension of my being.
I was also determined to try and apply some of this process to the
orange flood plain paintings. Their bright and jarring colours were almost too
much to process and in some way repelled the viewer. Yet, sections of them work
in isolation and I began to explore this. I have begun and will continue to
paint sections of these landscapes, cut outs, blown up and realised in a range
of media. These have become abstracted regions of these larger paints and have
a new more direct language. One of the reasons for this is that there is a
background where as in the Edge Diffraction paintings the is none other than
the white paint.
The horizon has also been removed from
these abstracted forms, something that is universally recognisable, a mark that
was stopping the work from moving more into abstracted plains.
I feel the relationship between the
Edge Different and Orange Abstracts will create an interesting dialogue, one
potentially feeding into the other. I also intend to look at the transitional state
of the background and how it may actually become totally obscured in the orange
paintings.
The handling of the paint will also be
of vital importance, potentially affected by the scale of the work. I plan to
work on larger canvases which will question the type of brush and mark.
The presence of the landscape also has
a role to play in my mind, even if the horizon has been removed. This was the
original intention of the work, to represent a landscape and have the viewer
experience it. I have to question how important it is. Currently I believe that
it is vital for how the paintings are perceived and want to make sure that it
remains. How I do this I’m unsure because the orange landscape close ups look
far removed from this context. This is one of the problems for me. How can
these retain a sense of their origin and not simply become a random collection
of abstract shapes?
One of the ways I can see this working
is by making sure I work directly from my source imagery rather than begin to
create random abstract elements. Without even realising it these reduced forms
still retain the heritage of the landscape and it is through this that they
maintain a dialogue with the land of their conception.
For this reason, photography will
remain an important element of my practice, probably primarily film. These will
form part of a growing archive that I’m compiling online. The walks that I take
the photographs on will also be an important initial stage to begin a series of
works. The tones, shapes and setting all play some part in the compositions
even when the images become abstracted. I want to be open to potential sources
and may well start collecting general media photographs and put them through a
process of abstraction of reprinting and be in a continuing state of collecting
material rather than just restricting it to walks.
But is this important? Is the original,
more complex, image integral? I feel at the moment it is but as these paintings
grow and the process evolves does the landscape of my mind become more
important? Does the presence of my existence become more evident and does it,
as Ian McKeever stated, “manifest itself through the form of painting”.
2825 word count
Bibliography
GAYFORD, M.
(2015) Memory Traces, Apollo Art
Magazine, New York
MORTON, T. (2002) If... Frieze Magazine Issue
67, [Online] http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/if/
SHAW, G (2016) My Back to Nature, Exhibition
at National Gallery, UK, London
MCKEEVER, I (2014) Interview
shot at Galleri Andersson/Sandström in Umeå, Sweden
