Luc Tuymans

Luc Tuyman's made figurative paintings.

1980s
"Made his first mark, when he began to explore Europe's memories of World War II. With harsh, elegant paintings like gas chamber like:

Gas chamber (1986) 

Which depicts the Dachau concentration camp. "

"Displaying the gap between represented image and historical event, Luc Tuyman's paintings delve into the inner workings of how mythology is created. "

Still Life, 2002, Oil on Canvas, 347 x 500 cm

2002 

"Luc Tuyman's focused on works of art with political or social commentary , many expiated Tuyman's to make new works in response to the New York attacks on September 2001. Instead he presented a simple still-life executed on a massive scale , deliberately ignoring all reference to world events leading to negative critiques."

Maypole 

2000, Oil on Canvas, 224x116 cm

Within

2001, Oil on Canvas, 223 x 243 cm 

"Luc Tuyman's paints the indescribable. His dark muted scenes seem vaguely familiar."

Tuyman's work will help influence my own work as the atmosphere he creates is captivating and I want to bring that into my drawings / paintings to create much more depth and atmosphere. 

Giving my drawings almost a story like Tuyman's so that the places I paint have a history and a meaning like my film work.

Tony Hill

" Tony Hill has an interest in space, place, viewpoint and orientation to his practice as an artist and film-maker.
He creates bizarre and sometimes humorous vantage points that make us re think our assumptions about perspective, gravity , scale and movement.

Developing his own camera rigs and ingeniously using mirrors and unusual lenses he exploits the great potential for film to see in different ways to show us the world afresh. "

100 heads

The doors

and Striking images.

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean is English.

She makes films and does photography. "Her practise of drawing took form of storyboards,  a narrative format used in the planning of movies. Her taste for storytelling triggered many of her works, often based on the possibilities raised by chance encounter.

Dean gave equal weight to fictional and historical narratives, emphasising their power of evocation: notions of time, memory or nautical elements are part of her personal themes.

Deans works play poetically on the theme of searching as well as on the blurred identities of mysterious people or things.

Deans stories embraced the notion of struggle over elements, which explain the recurrence of the sell as a major protagonist in her work.

Deans minimal narratives are imbued with a sense of human failure and never ending expectation resulting from actions that are curiously both heroic and modest.

Some of Deans later works are reminiscent of the works of Berud and Hilla Becher in their focus on derelict places endowed with powerful history. The quaint and obsolete buildings are the remains of some prototype air-raid warning structures built in 1920; by accompanying the images with ambient sound recorded in 1999, she doubles the act of preservation of those buildings, already saved from destruction in 1988.

David Rowan Mac Birmingham.

Artist : David Rowan

Title : The Dark River

Date(s) : 2014

"Running from Waseley Hills in Worcestershire to Birmingham’s Spaghetti Junction, the River Rea is a comparatively small river, often occluded by buildings and almost forgotten in a city more famous for its canal network. The Rea is, however, the subject of a video installation by artist David Rowan showing at mac, Birmingham. Entitled ‘The Dark River,’ the work seeks to explore and uncover facets of its unique character."

"In moving images that glow against the black gallery wall, the colours of sky, bushes and red brick structures are vivid in bright sunlight, dappled by the trees. The river narrows and widens, rushes and then pools. Two young boys play football in the water and two other people ride bicycles through shallower sections of the river. Some of the lining walls are covered with graffiti and the lush vegetation is kept wild by a lack of human intervention."

What I found interesting was how it was a simple idea yet captivated me as an audience to see what would happen in each film. I like the way it is presented in more than one film, I think this will be something that I will think about in the future. 

"Rowan’s slices of time and space allow for a kind of distillation or preservation of these fleeting moments within the Rea’s course. Ultimately, the thing that makes this installation most engaging is its specific context. The river must be crossed to enter and exit mac, and therefore when viewing Rowan’s work, the Rea runs just a few metres away from one’s feet."

How it is displayed. 

Annie Leibovitz 'Pilgrimage'

"As a historian, nothing matters more to me than the chance to wander through the rooms where my subjects lived and worked, to imagine them coming down the stairs for breakfast, writing steadily at their desks, entertaining guests at dinner, settling down in their favourite chairs to read. The people may be gone, but the houses remain. The landscape may have changed, the furniture, rugs, and draperies may be only the best representation of what was thought to have existed at the time, and yet, somehow, as one moves from room to room the people who lived there are brought to life."

This is a quote from Annie Leibovitz and I feel this explains my work very well as it is what I am aiming to do with my films, as well.

All below:

Annie Leibovitz. From “Pilgrimage” (Random House, 2011)

Stills

For my assessment I plan on displaying some film stills alongside my moving image to show the process of the editing. I may show some that were not shown in the actual film. 

Emma Stibbon

Drawing is the main focus of Emma Stibbon's work. She travels recording her responses to the physical appearance and psychological impact of natural and built environments. She works from photographic sources and sketches to create monochrome large scale drawings on paper. 

ink and volcanic dust 130 x 183 cm

Sea III by Emma Stibbon

polymer photogravure

Emma Stibbon statement:

I see my work fitting somewhere within a North European Romantic tradition – landscape has a peculiar hold over the British psyche and the rich literary and visual legacy of Romanticism in British art is defining in terms of my own values and beliefs. However I am aware of a tension here, in a contemporary context, our perception of landscape is always contingent. What may have been considered wilderness or pristine in nature we now have to recognize is often fragile or under threat. Our perception of place is refocused through a changing environment. I am interested in whether drawing or print can connect the viewer with the urgencies of our relationship with environment  and an experience of place.Landscape holds a complex document of memory and histories. Whether in the change over geological time evident in a rockface, or the transformation of topography in a built space we can recognize a certain mutability of place, a passage of time. I find this both an attractive and perplexing question, and it is often the reading of a place, my efforts to understand how it has come about that provokes me to draw. For me the act of drawing has almost magical qualities, allowing me to connect the physical with memory.

Much of my work takes me on location. My interest in landscape has taken me to diverse sites; from local places to the remote regions of Antarctica. I am interested in environments that are in a condition of flux or change. Landscape is a central concern – whether that’s man-made such as buildings in a state of demolition or abandon, quarried landscape or thru the forces of nature such as geologically changing or glacially eroded landscape. I am interested in how the apparently monumental or permanent can be so fragile.The work is located in an ambiguous timescale, it is not about a historical place any more than the present. I believe place can be read as a palimpsest, a sort of layering of historical traces. And of course this cycle of decay and regeneration in nature is inevitable and relentless. There is always that humbling thought that nature will of course, eventually take everything back.

For my drawing project I have been looking at buildings some that I see everyday and some I see whilst travelling. I have looked at how the lines are placed to create the building. Looking specifically at architecture drawings.

I have gone two different ways with this project. The more realist way which is what I really enjoy doing as it takes time to create the layers and then the more abstract way which is bold. I also like exploring buildings as I can create different brush marks to create different textures. For instance bricks as they fade into the distance.

I think that the ones that are most successful are the ones that has a vanishing point a focus to the image that draws the viewer in.

I have been looking at George Shaw.

George Shaw

I have started to look at Michael Craig Martin- The way in which he creates large bold shapes with tape. This is something that I want to explore within my work as I think it would make it stronger. Especially using tape as I can create bolder lines. When I use watercolour it is quite washed out. Although I do like that effect. I think it would be interesting to see the two mixed, creating a dynamic contrast. 

In my next few posts I will explore Michael Craig Martin's work in much further depth to understand his techniques and meanings behind his works. To help influence my own work. I hope to explore my drawing in this minimal way to take away the distraction of details and look purely at shapes and lines. I will start off with plain black tape and then may move to using coloured tape to see what different effects I would get.