And it had all these meanings that linked to film genres as well as wider themes: it's a portrait, a clown and a seducer, but there's also a key, a lock, a heart, a castle and a precipice. And while it's about looking, it's also blind, so that made me think about what a camera actually sees as well as more existential questions about the strangeness of looking at things. The title is the name of the town in Nevada where Charlie Chaplin 's leading lady, Edna Purviance, had grown up.
At the same time as making the painting I'd rented all Chaplin's films from my local library and was completely absorbed by his life and work. I thought about how Fellini and all the directors and artists I liked were influenced by the Little Tramp character, and how the machines used to make silent comedies cheered people up all around the world, whereas now the camera often feels intrusive.
The most interesting thing was obviously how the invention of cinema — the moving viewpoint machine — linked with the invention of cubism. My most recent show was about how Picasso and Chaplin, as leaders of these two strands, eventually met in Paris and had this funny time communicating via mime. By this time my studio was filled with paintings and sculptures of old movie cameras and projectors, and I was looking at the period after the revolutions they had brought about.
I couldn't ignore their complex natures, nor their relationships with women, yet I think they were very brave, not only creatively but politically. It makes me quite sad that Chaplin isn't revered in the same way here as Picasso is in Spain and France. But maybe that's the thing about the power of the single image, it comes back to painting in the end. People often use the term abstract to describe my paintings.
I don't consider them abstract because I'm working from a somewhat indistinct and hazy place towards a very specific and concrete image. I am constructing an image from nothing and try to define it very clearly, so it becomes legible. At the same time, I want it to be as open as possible. I begin with bright acrylic washes to quickly set up a starting point, and go from there with not much of a plan — it's very spontaneous. Later on, I define shapes more clearly and add other elements, for example: outlines, stripes or shadows, to create lots of possibilities.
A long phase of trial and error commences. Towards finishing, it becomes a matter of editing, narrowing down the options again, and trying to define things more clearly, though there is still a lot of going back and forth. I have some paintings in the studio for maybe a couple of years, and others for many more, but I don't work on them consistently. I often get stuck and leave them for a while. There are hardly any that don't get finished at some point, because all the failures are in the stages of the paintings — the failures are on top of each other, on the same work.
I finished Zebe within a couple of years. It has far fewer layers than some other works because the basic composition came about much quicker. The longer part of the process was getting the proportions and shades of the colours and stripes right, to create a sense of movement. The image jumps off the wall, grabs your attention, and keeps you looking. As you look deeper, you might begin to think about the artist, wonder who they were, what they were thinking, what emotional response they were hoping to instill in their audience.
Then perhaps you reflect on your own interpretation of the work — the message you think it conveys, your emotional response, whether you like the image or not. In that moment, that work of art has come to life. As Vincent Van Gogh once said,. They serve as a window into the life of the artist.
I have never been to the Louvre or seen the Mona Lisa, but I have experienced this artistic aura. You can see in his eyes that there is torment. His face is emotionless amidst the frenzy of brush strokes, perhaps a reference to his creative haven in the surrounding psychological storm. You get a sense of this from the photograph but in person at the Art Institute of Chicago it is an entirely different experience. The first time I saw this painting, I walked into the gallery and was completely alone.
The painting was behind me, and I had a sense that someone was watching me. I had a few minutes to get up close, really close to the painting, and study it before a group of people entered the room, and I had to move on.
Personal transformation aside, she will never evaluate art the same way again. Here are some ideas for ways to push your practice forward from the subcontinent. By Hilary Harkness. Not at the Taj Hotel in Kovalam, India. Kovalam is a tropical vacation town at the Southern tip of India.
Because as I mentioned before, its about the necessity of slowing down. And painting does exactly that. For a spectator, looking at a painting is always a little bit more of a physical experience than looking at a reproduced image. Has discussing your work changed the way you approach it - or made you more of a critic than a painter? LT: Not at all. The're just two different things.
What remains important is the fact that when someone makes the choice to be an artist, it is a choice of conviction. When you are not convinced that you will be an artist - you will never be one.
Do you agree that you are one of the most influential painters of the 21st century? LT: I cannot deny that I've had a massive influence, but that's only regarding the topical element, the surface.
0コメント