Spectacle

Artist's Statement

Spectacle Project

For this project I definitely wanted to create an image that you needed to look at for a while to really experience and find all of the information and details. After doing a little research and looking at a lot of different artists, I decided to base my artwork loosely on Islamic art. Islamic art does not picture living things, and the most popular kind of Islamic art, that which resides in Mosques and in religious contexts, is often simply an infinite pattern that is designed to inspire awe in the viewer. Rather than awe for God however, I hope to inspire a general sense of awe using color, texture, repetition and pattern. I will use one shape/character as a "stamp" and repeat this shape in different colors (taken from personal photography) in order to create a colorful, awe-inspiring spectacle.

Sketches

Final

DIgital Landscape- My Project

Here are some of the sketches that i created for this project and some elements/images that I used in the project.

Here are the final 5 renderings, each slightly different in their use of light to create a space. I am struggling with the decision on how to pick which is the best, because I am not sure if the final should be more "realistically" lit, as in it should fade into the background, or if it can be completely unrealistic and flat. I think that it should look slightly unrealistic, because the print should shove the images that we miss every day into our faces.

My final printed image

Artist Research

EDWARD HOPPER is one American painter that I particularly like. Not all of his paintings are landscapes necessarily, but they often have a lot of landscape characteristics. Take "Nighthawks", perhaps his most famous painting (I have a poster of this one hanging in my room). What I like about Hopper's work is the point of view, or the opinion, that he gives the audience. One really feels as though they are looking into this diner at night when no one is around but the few regulars who have no where else to be. This is more of a "scene" than a landscape in my opinion but shares many qualities with landscape painting such as placement and form, and the basic premise is still to capture a scene.

Although Hopper worked primarily in oils, he was equally masterful as a watercolorist and printmaker. Most often his work falls under the movement of Realism, portraying America through his eyes. Here are two other paintings by Hopper. Note his use of dramatic lighting to create an interesting and captivating scene.

   

FREDERIC EDWIN CHURCH is a second American landscape artist in whose work i can find inspiration. His dramatic use of light creates an ambience, or mood associated with the painting. Church painted mostly in the mid 19th Century, and most of his paintings are categorized today under the American Luminism movement. Similar to impressionism, luminism's primary focus is on the use of light in each painting and how it affects or changes the scene.  Here is a famous painting by Church that exemplifies the luminist ideal:

Here are a few other examples of Church's paintings, both painted on trips to South America:

    

THOMAS COLE is a final artist that inspires me. In particular, one series of paintings that he completed in 1840 I think applies very well to this project and helped me generate my idea for my final print. This series is called "The Voyage of Life" and depicts a person traveling by boat down the river of life from infancy to youth to manhood to old age. This is a series of four paintings that I have known about for a long time and seen in person at the National Gallery. I also have small prints of each painting in my room. Each painting depicts a scene with a different mood to the stage of life. This mood is generated again through use of light, but when viewed together the audience has a distinct sense of traveling from one painting to the next. Here are the four paintings, in order from infancy to old age:

Here is another article about the Voyage of Life: 

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_n1_v151/ai_19191876/

Wiki also does a good job of explaining the allegory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_Life

Digital Landscape

Artist Statement

            With this project, I really wanted to explore perspective. Not only physical visual perspective, as in one point or two point perspective, but also as in the human perspective or point of view. When people walk through their everyday lives they are accosted by thousands of images, ideas and thoughts based on what is around them. Most of those thousands of images we have already seen thousands of times. People can walk through their daily routine without ever noticing the things around them, simply because to them those images are second nature to their lives. But what if those people were confronted with those images that they take for granted? What if those images were thrown into their faces in a blatant and purposeful manner so that they were forced to look at them, examine them and create an opinion on what they saw? It is possible then that people would view these images in a different way, perhaps gaining an appreciation of what they pass by on an everyday basis.

            With the above as my main goal there are a few details of the project that I would like to explore. I would like to use my own imagery for the project; a combination of imagery created in photoshop or illustrator and photographs. I will probably use photos from around campus in an attempt to create a personal connection with my work, and apply the above ideas to my own everyday life. I also want the final product to create the appearance of a pathway or at least have a clear destination. I will probably use one point perspective to accomplish this in one way or another. Colors in the final will be vibrant in order to capture that essence of the everyday that I feel is probably missing from most people’s lives. I really want this print to ask more questions and give less answers, because it is supposed to be about the possibilities of our paths rather than the concrete evidence of our paths. This landscape will only be able to exist in the digital world, but it will be an abstract depiction of our real world that we experience every day.