Marlene Dumas- Drawing

Marlene Dumas creates a wide variety of work including paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations.

Marlene Dumas (1953 Aged 60) 

‘I don’t have any conception of how big an average head is, I’ve never been interested in anatomy. In that respect I relate like children do. What is experienced as most important is seen as the biggest, irrespective of actual or factual size. In the movies everything is larger than life and yet you experience that as real(istic); all my faces are much bigger than human scale. From blowing up to zooming in, for me the “close-up” was a way of getting rid of irrelevant background information and by making the facial elements so big, it increased the sense of abstraction concerning the picture frame. The elimination of the background also did away with the place of being and environmental context.’ 

A quote from Marlene Dumas.

Key information from the quote includes; elimination of certain things that Dumas does not see is relevant to conveying the person.

Jule-die Vrou , 1985, 125 x 105cm

Die Baba 1985 ,Oil on Canvas on Linen ,130 x 110cm

Dumas' marks are visibly very expressive. Relating this to my work I could use similar colours and brush marks in my city scenes.

Dumas became well known for her portrait and figurative work . " Exploring a range of human emotion while reflecting on social and political attitudes. "

"Her emotional involvement with the subjects coupled with her distortion of the original photographs created unnaturalistic renderings that had characteristically a haunting edge."

"I am dealing with emotions that everyone feels. But I’m always conscious of this tension between knowing that you are making an object, a physical thing, and being aware that you are also referring to things [the emotions] that cannot actually be painted. If the painting works, that tension is in there."

—Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953, Cape Town; lives and works in Amsterdam)

The Woman of Algiers, 2001

Oil on canvas

78 3/4 x 39 1/2 in.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, partial and promised gift of Blake Byrne

An explanation of the artwork above- this explains what it is about and who influenced it;

"The Woman of Algiers’s composition is based on a photograph that appeared in the French newspaper L’Express; a naked woman is restrained by men on either side of her, her breasts and pubic area obscured by censor bars that evoke the socio-representational conventions of Dumas’s source material while also suggesting the rectangular forms of Mark Rothko. The title references work by artists including Pablo Picasso in which the subject is depicted as the exotic Other. In this way, Dumas questions the relationship of social history to the history of art."

Baddesley Clinton edit 3 without sound

Link

Editing more film from my visit. I think this is more successful from my last video as it is more atmospheric. I would like to add sounds to the videos to create more atmosphere.
I was not sure how long to make the videos. So I am thinking of joining the two together to see what it would be like.
I want to continue editing until I find one that I really like.
I am focusing on light and textures so it makes the viewer want to touch the objects being presented. I also want to show the house as it once was. As if someone was still living there.

I looked at some other videos that showed houses like this. They seemed to not show the house off in the best light.
This made me want to show my chosen house in a very atmospheric way.

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg is an American Painter and Sculptor , who is influenced by popular culture.  Rauschenberg also works in; photography, printmaking, paper making, and performance. He was known sometimes for "Neo Dadaist" which is something he shared with Jasper Johns.

"Rauschenberg's paintings were beginning to incorporate not only found objects but found images aswell - photographs transferred to the canvas by means of the silkscreen process.

Previously used only in commercial applications , silkscreen allowed Rauschenberg to address the multiple reproducibility of images , and the consequent flattening of experience that implies."



COMBINES:


"Rauschenberg picked up trash and found objects that  interested him of New York City and brought them back to his studio where they could become interrogated into his work."

He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprised. And it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became anew thing.

Rauschenberg's comment concerning the gap between art and life can be seen as a statement which provides the departure point for all understanding of his contributions as an artist. "

Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive I, 1963. Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas. Gift of Susan Morse Hilles, 1964.30.

Robert Rauschenberg ,Untitled, ca. 1954, Freestanding combine: oil, pencil, crayon, paper, canvas, fabric, newspaper, photographs, wood, glass, mirror, tin, cork and found painting with pair of painted leather shoes, dried grass, and Dominique hen mounted on wood structure on five casters; 86 1/2 x 37 x 26 1/4 in. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Panza Collection

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. 

Baddesley Clinton edit 2

Film work <Link

After the first edit of the video. I decided to be really specific of what I wanted to show from the footage I have. I have a lot of footage and I need to show the key elements that I am working with. I am looking at light and texture specifically.
I plan to make numerous versions, using different parts of the house.

Even on this video it is not how I would like it to be. I forgot to put some transitions in to the switching of clips so at the end it jumps around quite a bit.

I also want to start adding in sounds to create a more atmospheric piece like Zarina Bhimji's 'Yellow patch'.



Edit: 10th April, 2014.

After looking at the film a couple of times. I decided that I may edit out the flower clip, as that makes the house look like it is more looked after. Which is not what I am after.

Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood is an English filmmaker and photographer .  Taylor-Wood used to be a sculptor.

Taylor-Wood began exhibiting her artwork in the early 90s . ' In 1994, she exhibited a multi-screen video work titled Killing Time, in which four people mimed to an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood's work.'

Sam Taylor- Wood is part of the young british artists. She explores 'The split between being and appearance in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict – has always been in the centre of her creative work.'

'Work examines the split between being and appearance, often placing her human subjects – either singly or in groups – in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict.'

One of her most famous films ; A matter of time.

This takes a simple idea of still life and watching it decay over time. Here Taylor Wood is taking a theme that has been explored in many different mediums.

film

What I find extraordinary about it is that you think that nothing is happening and then suddenly it all changes. 

'The ability to play with time, stretching and quickening it is a distinctively modern phenomenon.'

Quotes from Sam Taylor Wood:

'I find that I put my body in my work when I am at a particularly difficult or joyous point because I want to feel that moment.'

Sam Taylor-Wood: When I have an idea it presents itself as one or either; it’s never “this could be a film or should it be a photograph?” When I have the idea, it’s either a photograph or it’s film, and it’s dictated by the idea almost instantaneously.

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.