.png)
- Apr 26, 2024
At the beginning of April, I spent a week away in Cornwall, specifically in the corner point. The quiet and historical landscape was the perfect retreat, and ideal inspiration for this project.
I previously came when I was a child, over 15 years ago, and can't remember much, so it was a discovery with fresh eyes. The trip reminded me of my connection not just to the land, but also the sea. (Perhaps owing to my star sign Pisces and having affinity with water). I'm reminded to explore all the elements, not just the land, which all link to my love of nature.
Analysing The Landscape
From the road perspective, the land is akin to The Peak District, waving horizons with wide open fields, cut by long and winding roads. In a car, you can reach from one coast to another within an hour, and this makes me think I'm on an island, as if Cornwall if separate from the English border.
The many historical sites and ruins adds layers of history, but also fantasy. You feel whisked away into another world, and literally into another time. The Cornwall Heritage Trust protects 16 sites, such as Iron Age villages, hill forts, stone circles, and burial structures; and many more operated by The National Trust and English Heritage. There is so many, you feel the entire land is lost in time, and you're walking through time itself.
Locations are essentially vessels to time, and the inhabited spaces are rich in history. When I think of Cornwall, the phrases 'rich soil', and 'lost energy' comes to mind. There is a harmonic connection between these now peaceful protections, the physical remains, and ghost energies from the people and stories that once resided there.
Take-aways
Thoughts about land history, and the energies that run through them
Locations are vessels in time
Connections between peaceful preservation, physical remains, and ghost energies from the lively past
How can I visualise this? Explore location-based memories and feelings through materials and illustration
References
Cornwall Heritage Trust, https://www.cornwallheritagetrust.org/visit/our-sites/
- Apr 25, 2024
I have multiple lines of inspiration inquiry, including artists, illustrators, and designers working in different materials. Below I elaborate further from my sketchbook.
Terry Hoff
Hoff creates paintings that express the energetic and fast-paced world we live in, portraying "oddly familiar" imagery that float within loud, crowded, and physically confusing spaces.
'Mariposa' was a 2019 exhibition in Los Angeles. His work embodies the feelings of overstimulation, and living in the rich and pop culture-heavy, western world. Within each form are layers of visual stimuli: Colours, shapes, textures, and patterns, and beneath these lie human forms, such as eyes. Hoff expresses our suffocation of information, media, and technology, and us getting lost in all the 'noise'.
Words come to mind such as over-stimulation, TV static, and brain neurons. Hoff successfully creates an image that the mind has not seen before, but attempts to relate to other references. I love the irregular shape, rounded edges, and blended colours (I assume airbrush), giving the illusion that it is digitally made, and not touched by hands. It also feels like it's alive, like a beating heart, or animated like ice cream melting in the sun.
Take-aways
Think about creating digital representations of the landscape.
Creating a sculpture, or an object that has never been seen before. Looks otherworldly. I like this juxtaposition between the familiar and unfamilar. Perhaps bring these elements into my own work.
Przemek Blejzyk
Blejzyk is a Polish artist who studies the mechanisms of nature and landscape, creating "multi-element compositions seeking a new way of representing reality in visual arts." (Sainer, 2024, https://www.sainer.org/bio)
"Although Przemysław Blejzyk decided to delineate his own path of formal searches, he is strongly inspired by the achievements of Polish colourists and master landscapists. He processes them creatively, taking into account the way in which we contemporarily consume visual messages – fast, among a barrage of stimuli and images. He puts together different formal languages, constructs multistage compositions, experiments with colour, and searches for relations between painting and music."
Urban Spree, 2023 (https://www.urbanspree.com/blog-container/sainer-opens-sainer-kol∞r-at-the-national-museum-in-gdańsk.html)
I love his unique take on landscape, where you can see visual elements of digital, cut-and-paste aesthetics. They appear like comic strips, representing the movement of time, and how the landscape changes with the light. His forms are reduced down to their essence, which captures the feeling of the world around them, and the experience of their lived spaces. Together, the forms create this feeling. Whilst separate, they are merely an abstract shape or colour.
His use of pixelated lines harshly cuts into the painting like TV static, or a glitch in the system. It reminds of the transitions between images, or video. Perhaps reflective of the different times in the day? If you look at 'UNTITLED LANDSCAPES 3', The arched curves take on the form of hills, and the multiple circles crowding the top-left suggest the animated movement of the sun or moon in the sky. It reminds us we are living in a digital world where images aren't necessarily real, and a literal boundary between his painted landscape and the majority pixels, reflects the connections between real and fake.
Take-away
Look at digital aesthetics, as being inspired by video games and creating open-world landscapes.
Think about comic strips, and painting more than one scene on the canvas? What do I wish to convey? The essence of time, movement, or the feeling of one moment maybe?
- Apr 21, 2024
In my last project I was process-led, focused on reigniting my artistic practice, and exploring facilities that were previously out of my reach. Within this project, I plan to explore and focus on deeper and more complex concepts, whilst still maintaining my visual, illustrative style that I have developed over a number of years.
I have a working title for the project:
Nature and The Landscape: Reimagining, Fusing and Playing with Reality
I will broadly explore my fascination with nature and the landscape. I'm interested in it's unique yet human-reflective aspects, such as life cycles and behaviours, separate and connected. I hope to explore my ideas using my interest in physics, space, reality, and sensory perception. These elements can trigger emotional responses that cause feelings of familiarity, calm, and possibility.
I hope to frame my exploration with these three subjects I am interested in, of which have inspired my love for nature and the landscape.
Nature and the landscape (Chosen subject)
Video games
Everyday life
I intend to explore my love for all three and fuse them together, creating unique ideas that play with reality, lead with a fun curiosity, and reflect my personal understanding of the world around me.
I will continue with my illustrative style I have developed over the years, as my practice is more illustration than 'Fine Art' based. I'm looking at many illustrators, artists, and designers, and further inspiration, to help contextualise my style, and explore how I can represent nature in other materials, and with specific chosen subjects. My fascination of tactile and textural objects makes me wonder about the potential of materials, specifically clay and wood. Kim Hono, a Japanese/Korean ceramicist, is a great example, who creates child-like, imaginative, designs inspired by his rural youth in Seto, Aichi.
"He treats clay as a canvas for the play of his brush: surface treatments encompass rugged monochromatic finishes, multi-coloured abstract designs, whimsical line drawings, and motifs from the natural world."
Daiichi Arts, 2024, Available at: https://www.daiichiarts.com/artists/79-kim-hono/overview/ [Date accessed 25th April 2024]
Specific questions I will be asking include:
How does my idea of a place, an object, or feeling, change with my personal experience and understanding?
What is the potential of my chosen interests, specifically fusing them together, and what will that look like?
The landscape is nostalgic to me, being brought up in a rural-surrounding town and county, and have many fun memories spent outside in nature, as a child and adult. I love the colours, textures, and sounds that reflect human behaviours and create mindfulness. Nature can encourage a simple life and slow-living, but look deeper, and you will find life that is complex, unpredictable, yet reflective, and reinforces subconscious behaviours. What's interesting, is that I arguably became more mindful of this, from playing multiple video games (Another one of my interests).
I have played video game since my youth, and the most memorable ones have extensively-developed worlds, landscapes, and lore to experience and explore. They reflected my love of much nature and the outdoors, which in my 20s I finally understood and put both interests together. I'm therefore interested in how video games develop worlds using digital tools, and how they can be replicated in the real world, creating a playful and otherworldly representation, which reflects emotions felt within the environment.
Find the full project proposal below.
