Author Archives: Jennifer Mawby

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Technology has become part of our nature

Japanese photographer Taisuke Koyama looks for new possibilities in photography to answer certain questions about how an image is transformed through the effects of natural phenomena, digital devices and the media. In stating that he believe technology has become part of our nature, he also asks how does the image feed our senses and our own internal image data?

“His abstract photographs and moving images employ experimental production methods to investigate the relationship between organic processes and phenomena and the technologies that facilitate their visual capture.”

I’m interested in his work and ideas because I feel like myself he curious about the current relationship between culture, society, and the physical world that exists between the real and the digital and what impact that has on contemporary image making. I feel I am seeking for possibilities through painting to answer questions about the nature of the painted image in light of the merging of natural media, digital devices, and digital image making.

Video with Koyama for the Aimia Ago Photography Prize 2017:

https://www.aimiaagophotographyprize.com/artists/taisuke-koyama

 

 

 

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Haptic Paintings

These monochromes explore and conflate the desire most of us have to touch paintings (and which is typically forbidden) and the way in which we must use touch to interact with images on screen (via touch screen technology).

What if that impulse to touch a painting was the subject of the painting, and the nature of gestures involved the marks and composition (tapping, double tap, pinch, scroll, and swipe).

High relief impasto, piped through tubes, represents those touches and gestures.

There is an intentional irony in the reduction of the pictorial and illusionary space with the use of the monochromatic palette and an heightened representation of the haptic impulse through the decorative impasto.

 

Gestures by Children and Adults on Touch Tables and Touch Walls in a Public Science Center: http://init.cise.ufl.edu/sites/default/files/Anthony-et-al-IDC2016.pdf

When Art Moves the Eyes: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0037285

How Do We See Art: An Eye-Tracker Study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170918/

 

 

 

 

 

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Ideas, Research |

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Pattern – circuit boards

The lines and dots in the patterns of circuit boards serve as a reference point for some recent sgraffito markings in my paintings. The green and blue colour of these photos have a curious reference to green and blue screen pigments used in visual effects and digital image compositing.

Ideas, New Work |

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Questionable taste and the decorative.

During recent weeks in the studio I’ve realized there is a sub-text weaving through my current paintings that has relationship to high and low “taste” and the nature of decoration. Decoration implies the domestic and not the quotidian but an idealized and “gussied up” version of the everyday from the pages of an interior design magazine. Taste is then implied. High style, low style, street style, and the choices made which reflect on personal taste and the quality of that taste.

The paintings I’m making right now following my own post-analog rules are dense with pattern and form (the sgraffito layers require it) and those element recall the impulsives of the Pattern and Decoration movement. Ben Johnson describes their paintings in this way: “Pattern and Decoration did not distinguish between background and foreground, nor did it emphasize specific aspects of the composition. Rather, much as the abstract paintings of the time, it covered the canvas from edge to edge in an all-encompassing design. At the outset of the movement, Pattern and Decoration artists reacted against the severe lines and restrained compositions of minimalism. Yet, they often retained the same ‘flattening grid’ frequently employed by Minimalist painters.”

My references have been very similar. Pattern and Decoration artists “looked at Roman and Byzantine mosaics in Italy, Islamic tiles in Spain and North Africa. They went to Turkey for flower-covered embroideries, to Iran and India for carpets and miniatures, and to Manhattan’s Lower East Side for knockoffs of these. Then they took everything back to their studios and made a new art from it.”

Decisions about flatness and differentiation between the background and foreground are highly relevant in my new works as is the focal point of compositions. Some of my works in progress flatten the entire surface and some create the optical illusion of dimensionality with simple shadow effects. I’m looking at early computer art and 80’s graphics, Persian miniatures and engraved Medieval manuscripts, art deco patterns, and electronic circuit boards.

 

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Ideas for paintings from economics

THE MARGINAL PRODUCT

The marginal product is the change in the production output resulting from a change in a production input. When companies calculate the marginal product, they must hold all factors, with the exception of the increase in units of labor, constant.

PROCESS WASTE

Waste is defined as: an unusable or unwanted substance or material produced during or as a result of a process, such as metabolism or manufacturing.

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Ideas, Research |

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Reading marks

Marks are the alphabet for the language of the painter.

For several years I’ve been painting using sheets of paper as my palette. This started as a convenience based on the shared studio I was using and the fact that my glass-topped tabouret was in storage. When frustrated in the studio I’d often find that the paper palettes were more pleasing to look at than the real work underway. I became interested in how the marks provided evidence of the artwork manufactured but were somehow better and a more authentic record of the painting experience. The marks were like the DNA of the painting in it’s most primal form. The paper palettes were documentary. They were documents and as such they provided the key to translating the marks. I was reminded of dictionaries and translation keys.

Joan Snyder’s painting Untitled 1970 (and many others by her) feels to me like a catalog of brush strokes, organized in Snyder’s grid structure. Snyder talks at times about using the idea of musical transcription – the lines on her canvas like the staff marks on paper music and the brush strokes the musical notes.

More recently I stumbled across the glass paintings of Ryan Gander. The works on circular glass palettes are the evidence of a self portrait he made everyday for one year. (Self Portrait XII from 2012 is a series of 31 glass pieces). Mounted on the gallery wall with small shadows the marks float in space. The paint marks show little of blending and brushing. Colours look like they came straight from the tube with little mixing. He may have blended the paint on the canvas if indeed he made the paintings at all.

For me the difference between the two works is that with Synder, we try to interpret the marks as a kind of calligraphy or transcription. With Gander’s work we are left wondering about the final result, the presume self portraits, and to imagine what they looked like.

 

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Negative and Positive Space

Positive = optimistic, favourable, good, beneficial, addition, affirmative.

Positive space = tangible, in real life, 3 dimensional, presence,

Negative = detrimental, pessimistic, difficult, incorrect.

Negative space = Intangible, virtual, subtraction, reduction, deletion.

 

Ideas, Research |

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Classic movie trailers

I’m still intrigued by the structure, dramatisation, and voice overs in classic movie trailers. I’m still interested in using elements in new video works. Unlike the films the source of my inspiration promote, in this case the trailer is the work.

Francesco Vezzoli has worked with similar ideas, but more literally than the way in which I want to work. His 2005 project at the Venice Biennale which was a fake trailer for a fake remake of the film ‘Caligula,’ which included Benicio Del Toro and Courtney Love. In 2007, his fake political debate Democrazy pitted Sharon Stone against Bernard Henri-Levy in competing campaign advertisements.

The 1978 promotion for Woody Allen’s film Interiors (his homage to Ingmar Bergman) intersperses critical commentary on the film in voice over and text cut between atmospheric clips from the theatrical footage.

 

 

studio journal |

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Small and intimate

When I first started painting seriously I was travelling and making my money by being photographed. I was making small, intimate paintings that I could cradle and hold in one arm while painting with the other. The subject matter could be described as proto-selfies. I sketched my own body looking down at it from a first person cinematic point of view. Mostly sketched while I lay in bed between rumpled sheets, the motif was a classical one of the female nude and drapery which I then rendered in a flat and graphic way. Not cartoonish nor graphic (like the 80’s artist Nagel) because the lines quavered and varied. The paint was dry gouache on linen. The dryer and chalkier the better. I loved the way that the paint absorbed the light and had a real world quality — it was not glossy or finished. There was an accessibility to the material. There was a system. Objects were painted in 3 variations of a colour tone. Shapes were outlined.  Some of the ways that I am working now on paintings (the smaller scale, the return to the figure, contour drawing, flatness and mattness in paint against brushiness and sheen) feel the same as the experiences of painting this past work — and it feels good. It feels like I’m connected to something authentic.

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Flat Modern World

I’m looking carefully at Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005). Trolling the hashtag on Instagram. Searching installation images of a recent show at The Approach Gallery in London. The flat shapes. The tableau of the quotidian. The geometry against painterly realism. The occasional and thrilling pop of impasto straight from the tube. The paintings hold markers of the time in which they were made: pop art, graphic screen printing, flatness, dull and browned palette, objects now obsolete (desk pen connected to a stand by a ball chain; push button telephone; repositionable wall lights; ochre ceramic casserole dishes), awkward and overwrought arrangements of food and fruit, half drunk whisky and wine glasses. There is contrast, humour, colour, flatness and strong, black outlines.

influencers Magritte and Matisse and his influencees Gary Hume and Julian Opie (and others).

Compositions of domesticity and urbanism. Compositions with a space and a stillness which passes for a kind of reverence and contemplation.

I’m taking notes and making studies of all this. Contemplating and considering.