I am writing this blog in order to create my own moving and developing online version of a visual Journal. The sketchbook for me is the highlight of a project, from the research and the links forged, through to the journey of an idea, I am happily filled with a sense of excitement and purpose, I revel in the unravelling of information and in the development and articulation of the idea and spend hours filtering through sources in order to explain my intentions and let others know the map I have created in my own mind. The sketchbook process allows me to absorb my environment and contemplate my world, it allows me to grow and changes my path every time. To challenge myself in this final year I am endeavoring to try a new way of sharing and archiving my journey, putting aside the pritstick and Scissors, pulling up my chair and putting on my glasses this will now be my Sketchbook.
So here it begins a diary of the idea, growing and moving as I go forward with the project. It is what it is. What it will become ... I have no idea and to you the viewer I make no apologies.

Joseph Derby

Joseph Derby
Cottage on Fire at Night, oil on canvas, ca. 1785-1793

Thursday, 23 September 2010

Modern Landscapes

So far I have documented the historical landscape art that inspires me, from Dante's world written as far back as the fourteenth century through to the works of Turner, Joseph Wright, Salvator Rosa and more over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These works set a precedent for future artists, those of which im going to explore next.


Charles E Burchfield (1893 - 1967)
Village in the Swamp, 1930










American visionary artist. A watercolor painter from Ohio, Burchfield is known for his visual commentaries on the effects of Industrialism on small town America as well as for his paintings of nature described as "the mystic, cryptic painter of transcendental landscapes, trees with telekinetic halos, and haunted houses emanating ectoplasmic auras." His influences as van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Marsden Hartley, John Marin the Village Voice, "Mystic cryptic revelations" by Jerry Saltz, Dec 13, 2005


SURREALIST LANDSCAPES
Max Ernst (1891 - 1976)
DIe Lust Leben 1936

Die Faszinierende Zypresse 1940 
Nightmare


Max Ernst's are alien. they can be apocalyptic and some remind me of films such as Day of the Triphids, I love the unusual shapes created and Ernst's techniques of applying paint add to the sporadic and fantastical images. 
There are several Techniques I would like to experiment with in my project;

SURREALIST TECHNIQUES


  • AEROGRAPHY - 3D Object used as a stencil with spray paint
  • BULLETISM - Shooting ink at a blank surface and developing an image from the marks
  • COULAGE - Involuntary sculpture. Molton material poured into cold water and cooled to take random forms
  • ECLABOUSSURE - Watercolour or oil laid down and water or turps splattered on the surface, then blotted to  create new dimensions
  • ENTOPIC GRAPHOMANIA - Dots made at sites of impurities in paper and lines made between dots.
  • EXQUISTIE CORPSE
  • ETRECISSEMENTS - Collage made reductively cutting out parts of images to encourage a new image
  • GRATTAGE - Scraping away dry paint
  • HEATAGE - Exposed & Unfixed photo negative heated from below causing the emulsion to distort in a random fashion
  • SOUFFLAGE - Liquid paint is blown to inspire or reveal an image
  • FRACTAL DECALOMANIA - As the sheets separate paint adheres to both the top and bottom forming noges between the papers with increasing distance between the papers. The paint ridges coalesce and a branching pattern appears, as more and more ridges coalesce, a dendritic fractal forms. 
Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)
Swans reflecting elephants

Autumn Cannibalism



Remedios Varo (1908 - 1963)
Remedios Varo was a spanish-Mexican female surrealist painter. I am looking at her as she was famed for using the ECLABOUSSURE technique listed above. 

Valle Luna
James Gleeson (1915 - 2008)
James Gleeson was an Australian Surrealist, his themes included literary, mythological and religious subject matter and was interested in Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious. During the 1950's and 60's he moved to a more symbolic perspective forming small psychedelic compositions made using the surrealist technique of decalcomania in the background, to suggest a landscape.




James Gleeson is one of my favourite painters, his dreamy ethereal, fragment subjects create their own worlds, as a viewer you can spend so much time just piecing together the scene, the palette he uses has a darkness to it but is lifted with pale blue hues and yellow highlights, they have appear to be quite spiritual in my eyes.