Describe your image here.
I am currently exploring what makes a ‘landscape’, challenging the interpretation of gestural brush strokes and mark making methods against our predetermined definitions of the ‘landscape’ or landscape painting. “the sublime is a formless object” – Immanuel Kant, calling upon this idea I look at how creating landscapes that may not hold impressionistic values; but instead hold abstract and minimalist forms will read. I disregard colour within my works to focus on form, texture and use this absence to create high contrast works. Through creating large scale monochrome painting, I look to unravel my own interests in the definition of ‘landscape’, ‘sublime’ along with the duality of image and how the viewer reads a piece of artwork.
Within my practice I call upon my archive of landscape and cityscape photographs; which I then heavily manipulate using photoshop with some becoming completely surreal and others still holding form but through only two tone. I then use a view finder on these images to find areas that interest me or areas I would associate or could define as a landscape; although most have no real representation of the original photograph. I seek to recreate these digital images on canvas by using mark making methods and gestural brush strokes, which would usually be associated with abstraction expressionism and minimalism. The idea is to grasp at the essence of the sublime that Immanuel Kant suggests is formless and has no boundaries.
I have also been exploring a different enquiry of art practice where I look at the defining points within landscape painting and try to create landscapes using expressive techniques. I have found that the key rules/ ideas around painting / depicting a “Landscape” can be categorised under these headings. Focal Point, Horizon Line, Composition, Value and Form. I try to limit the amount I use in one piece as I am looking for the grey area between a landscape and a purely abstract piece. I’ve started to explore paint as a medium a lot more recently, using different tools and techniques like dry brushing, or using pallet knifes, rollers and squeegee’s; to take away the evidence of human hand and swap it with movement and emotion.
My final form of enquiry comes from looking into the definition of a landscape, with my search only finding literal ideas about landforms; I took to finding my own. I thought about how a computer would define a landscape. Taking fundamental computer definition of words based around or describing landscapes; I use the binary code allocated to letters and create visual art based on the string of digits. Using 1 as black and 0 as white, this links heavily to my past in computer science but also into my interests in duality and the relationship between black and white.