This project reinterpreted Gustav Cailbotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day, as pictured above, while retaining the umbrellas. The Art 21 theme used was "secrets", and the three creative strategies used were: coded communication, silhouettes of shapes, and expressive line. Overall, the painting has to do with lies, in this particular case, cheating. This piece, through working with it, has quickly become an emotional attachment to me. A lot of myself, specifically that of past relationships, is poured into this piece, but not explicitly. I wanted to make it as abstract and indirect as possible (while at the same time being aesthetically appealing) but just direct enough where someone can sort of get the idea as to what the figures were, humans/individuals and maybe a trace of its symbolism.
The coded communication, which is done in morse electric telegram messaging, reads "Lie" and is seen on the sides of the building in the distance as well as in red paint on the yellow figures, and also on the rectangular shape between them. The silhouettes are of people, or other bodies. These represent association with the figure with the red dot for a head. In fact, the warm colors in this piece are of association with this figure. Notice the targets all over the figure's body and those colors' distribution throughout the painting. Expressive line wasn't used primarily throughout the piece, but it's there. (I didn't fully read the criteria before I started the painting, so it was sort of implemented late into the process which is a fault on my part). The intentional expressive lines are the wavy ones, which represent uneasiness/disorientation. This again is symbolic, and all ties into to a specific idea within secrets. I enjoyed this piece overall. Even though I made errors early in the work, It turned out to be one of my favorite pieces ever for me on a personal level, as a lot of my emotion was translated into this piece while still retaining the original paintings proportions and general placement. I didn't grasp initially how the setup would actually be. I presumed that the card-stock cutouts would be elevated from a white support so there would be layering, so I arranged the 5 layout ideas in accordance to that idea. I didn't fully realize however how the layout would actually be, so the final product looks nothing like any of these layouts. Fault on my part for not paying keen attention.
For this work inspired by Goldsworthy, my partner Theresa Balinski and I agreed to work with the light from the sun and how that could be used to produce interesting effects. We chose to use pine cones because of their diversity in size and more importantly the contrast of the in-and-out depths that make it up with the "wings" of their seeds. We get really great and stark contrast from it, and it looks interesting up close as well as from a difference. We also had pine cones that were closer to the trunk of the tree point towards the trunk itself, and these cones would also be similar in color to the tree bark. We decided not to include the shadow of the tree to have any pine cones so the idea of sunlight and shadows war further enhanced. It represented the idea of ephemera in that within an hour the shadow of the tree would have moved, breaking the structure of the piece.
The lyric I used for this piece was "Another day staring at the ceiling", from Breathe by Telepopmusik (http://www.lyricsmania.com/breathe_lyrics_telepopmusik.html)
Originally,the design would have been more complicated, I forgot initially the the primary focus had to be on the symbols, in this case, binary (replacing 1 with a triangle, 0 with a circle), so I took away some of the complications so that the symbols/code acted as the complications, made so by the intricate contrast of the pattern covering the surface of the foam head and wine glass. This piece represents lying down, staring at the ceiling for an extended amount of time while affected by some sort of depressant, in this case, alcohol as represented by the wine glass. The glass also acts as the line of sight for this individual, staring upwards. The clockface replacing the eyes and nose represent the eyes themselves in a stationary position for an amount of time. I chose binary (replaced with shapes) so a more minimal approach was used, I didn't want over-complexity. The difference between the black sharpie and white head and glass were complex enough as mentioned above. I'm really fond of the surreal, especially in sculpture/model form in which they exist as dimensional objects, so I'm proud of the end result. The main difficulties were cutting the back of the head as an even (sort of) surface so it could lie on a surface. I only used an x-acto blade, so it took some time. Another issue that arose was gluing the wine glass to the clock-face, both plastic surfaces. |
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