What is Painting? As artists, we ask ourselves this question because it helps us determine the central qualities of this medium. During the 20th century, artists and critics worked to discover the essence of a medium and by the middle of the century, they thought they had it (according to Jackson Pollock’s champion Clement Greenberg it was flatness). Today, we understand the qualities of a painting to be much more flexible and fluid.
If we remove the physical paint quotient, what are we left with? What are Painting’s qualities? The way it’s created? The way it appears? Its effects? We will create a “painting” without paint to test these ideas. This is an opportunity to experiment with different materials and ways of working. Delve into several ideas and select the best option. Again, any materials and supports (or lack thereof) are open to you, but the end product should express something about your understanding of “Painting”.
Consider
Brainstorm some qualities of painting. What is the process? Visual attributes? Physical qualities? Effects?
Think of some examples that might or might not be painting. Why or why not?
What materials might be useful in creating a work that contains some of these ideas?
Materials
Anything except traditional painting media including oil/acrylic/watercolor paint
Part 1: Designs
Come up with 5 ideas for potential ‘paintings.’ For each, describe the materials, the process for creation, and a rough sketch of the final work. This will be a part of your project grade.
Due Friday, February 20.
Part II: Work
Use your initial ideas to generate a final version. It may be a combination of ideas/materials. Size, materials, etc. are up to you, but it should be something you can present or document.
Due Friday, March 13.
Look at
Cayce Zavaglia
This American artist abandoned traditional oil painting materials after the birth of his daughter in favor of non toxic ones. He began to use wool to create densely packed portraits. These ‘paintings’ still use the wool as a substitute for paint to create color, shape, value.
Rudolf Stingel
Stingel was born in Italy but resides and works in New York. His work explores the qualities of painting using a variety of materials and processes including interactive installation, step-by-step instructions for abstract paintings, and phlegmatic self-portraits in oil. He has an exibition opening Feb. 21 at Paula Cooper in NYC.
NY Times article
Polly Apfelbaum
Apfelbaum creates dazzling installations of fabric that she calls ‘fallen paintings’. Using dyed fabric, she creates vast organic forms that seem to spread and move over the floor.
Simon Evans
This New York based artist creates charts and maps out of snipped text and images. They are often autobiographical, absurd, and extremely literal.
Andreas Kocks
This artist uses cut paper to create wall installations. His work uses a varied and shifting sense of design that seems to spill outside of contained spaces.
I had a tough time deciding what exactly I wanted to do with this project. I am interested in mixed media. When looking at art in museums, I tend to be drawn to pieces that have something more than just paint. I came up with many ideas, more than what I actually wrote down. However, most of them did not get at the essence a painting. Reexamining my ideas, I decided that melting crayons would be the closest to what a painting really is for me. I was also excited about redesigning a craft that I use to love in preschool.
ReplyDeletePainting is about colors and strokes. It’s about shapes and shadows. Most importantly, a painting should make the viewer feel an emotion. A painting should create an experience, although this experience can be different for each person. Without the color and strokes or the shapes and shadows, a painting would not be able to create an experience. And why would people enjoy art if it did not create an experience for them?
I knew with the crayons I could get all of these things. I had a multitude of colors, which I could use to make shapes and shadows. Before when I was toying with the idea of a collage, I was missing the freedom of using different colors to create a mood. This is one of the reasons why I decided to go with the crayon idea than the collage.
I had a lot of funny creating these pieces by melting crayons into shapes of produce. It was difficult at first because it is working in a totally new medium. I had to work with the crayons, figure out what worked and what didn’t. I found out that I needed to heat the surface up before instead of melting the crayon drying that was already on the masonite. I found out that it works better if you rip the wax paper off quickly rather than slowly pulling it off. My favorite part about working in crayons was the fact that it forced my to paint loosely and quickly. I didn’t have much time to think about what I was doing because the masonite would cool and the crayons would not melt. Coming from painting Frida (twice), it took me awhile to get use to this style, but by the end I loved it. I hope to try to incorporate the loose stroke into my future paintings.
I liked how fun this project was. I felt like no one took a serious take on it, creating playful images. I like the experience I get when looking at other people’s work.
When asked to defend his work, Matisse wrote, “What I am after, above all, is expression…the entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share…everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, hurtful.” For me, this quotation sums up the essential qualities of a painting: an assemblage of colors and/or textures in which each element plays a vital role.
ReplyDeleteI tried to convey this idea in creating my sheep out of socks. I tried to place each sock so that it contributed to describing the sheep as a whole. Sometimes I found that the texture of a certain sock described the wool of the sheep well, but once I had placed it in the piece, the sock actually detracted from the effect of the other socks around it. My main goal in creating this piece was to try to find the balance that Matisse writes about, where each element of a painting contributes to the piece as a whole, and where anything added or taken away would weaken the expression of the painting.
Somewhat surprisingly, I really enjoyed working with socks. It was pretty physical work – after working on it I often noticed that my hands hurt from continually cutting up socks, poking myself with pins, or worse, the hot glue gun. It was so hands-on that I almost felt like I was creating a sculpture rather than a painting. I really liked my physical involvement with this piece – I felt a sense of control that I rarely feel when I’m painting. Usually when I’m painting I feel like I am at the mercy of the paint – I find that I often don’t like the way a piece looks but I have no idea what to do to fix it. With my sheep, whenever something wasn’t working, I felt in control of the situation and confident that I would be able to sort out the problem. Perhaps this is because it is easier to identify the individual socks that weaken the piece, rather than particular painted areas, which have no clear cut boundary and are often more subtle.
It has been really inspiring to watch the paintings of my peers evolve into finished pieces. Each one is unique and exemplifies different qualities that are essential to the definition of painting. I look forward to seeing them all in class tomorrow!
Siwen said...
ReplyDeleteMy initial understanding of painting is very narrow; I defined painting as "using paints to create an image". I think my understanding of painting is connected closely to my personal experience in painting and to the medias that I used to paint before.
This narrow understanding of painting in some sense limited my creativeness when I was brain storming for the project. I believe that I emphasized too much on the paint itself. Since paint is not allowed in the project, I came up with the idea of using cosmetics to "replace" paint. Cosmetics has the color feature of paint, at the same time creates a different texture. And also, I came up with the idea of using flower to add to the color and texture.
During the process of creating my project, I noticed that since cosmetics is a similar media as paint, it is more easy to control over. However, when I came to the flowers, I feel that it is so much harder. Different to paint, flower is a much less flexible media in terms of color and shape, and I wasn't able to follow the details as well. But I feel that since flower is less flexible, it actually allows me to look at the image from a different perspective. I have to grasp the general impression or emotion in the image, rather than follow every single detail. So in this sense, I think that using a different media is very helpful, especially if I want to do an abstract project. The final result is still different from what I envisioned before, partly due to the limitation of the flower media.
I was very surprised that when I see all the creative medias chosen by my classmates. I believe that every single choice has a lot to do with the person's understanding of paint. It's very interesting to see that how everyone has chosen different images to work with the color and texture of the media they chose. Fabric is one of the common medias. But, overall, I see that the idea of "painting without paint" give everyone a new understanding of painting.
When we were first assigned the project, I had a lot of varied ideas about how I wanted to convey the essence of painting in an art piece. Many of my ideas were very sculptural and I feel needed a lot of editing to still carry on the theme of our project.
ReplyDeleteI finally decided to do a paper mache 3D "painting" on canvas boards. I thought it would be the best way to convey the way I see painting; a think layer of colour styles in a way that makes object come off a flat surface, no matter if it is a 3 dimensional or 2 Dimensional art work, i always felt that art that I am draw to never failed to have an element that springs out of the canvas or whatever medium they were holstered in. I thought about how i would describe painting in these 3d shapes and i took lots of photos when i was in the process of painting for my other pieces.
I was really attracted to painting peaks i saw when i was mixing colours and various other shapes on my pallet. I pieced many of my photos up by doing detailed drawins of what i wanted the piece to look like, where certain shapes would be, how teh piece would flow.
I initially wanted to do a horizontal piece with 3 panels so that they could suspend the weight when i mounted it. It was less difficult than i thought to get to the general shapes i wanted for my piece, i was really nervous about it at first when i just had the base shapes taped to the panels and only had a few layers of paper on top of those shapes. They looked nothing close to waht i was getting at, and i was really going for a smooth almost casted shapes of what i wanted in my painting. I ended up spending a lot of time doing multiple layers on teh panels, sanding them, apply gesso and repeated so i could hide the paper that was showing through and give it a smoother more matted finish. Some of the shapes were really hard to construct, the peaks were surprisingly not as difficult to create compared to the leaking paint from the top, it was much more difficult to create a near perfect smooth edge for the bottom of the drops with this technique since its more difficult to get paper in that certain shape or form and to cover it with paper often caught on into small crevasse which showed through even after sanding and gesso.
I think the most difficult part of the painting was the final edit and separating the panels. Sanding such a large piece was killing! especially with the sculptures so fragile and the amount that needed to be sanded in a short time, i fianlly got a crew of friends to help me the day before it was due so get it looking as smooth as possible. I wanted to put other objects onto the panels e.g. a branch and a shoe just to play on the concept of traditional paintings of trees and scenery and the use of paper in this project. I also wanted to seal teh sides off so that the layers of paper could not be seen, but i decided it looked better without those objects and teh layers of paper that showed through after i cut the panels apart looked pretty interesting, they could be neater and the entire painting could look more like what i wanted it to look like if i had more time, but the overall finish im pretty happy with.
I felt like i learned a lot more about painting during the process of creating this piece than i did from the final outcome of it. A lot of editing and revisiting the same project changed a lot of what i initially planned for it to be. It looks much better vertically, i feel the rawness of the paper layers with the polished look could be further edited but is something i didn't plan on or though about when i first began the project. It really gave me a different perspective when working on a piece now.