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| My final painting's all placed together. |
For my final piece for the 'Epic Landscape's' Project I decided to Paint in the style of Fauvism and David Hockneys recent landscape work. The main characteristics that I wanted to take from Fauvism were the vibrancy and warmth of the colours, the reason for this is because I felt it depicted a different view of the image, something you wouldn't capture in bog-standard landscape photograph or landscape painting.
The first thing I needed to do for my painting was to actually choose an image, for this I chose an area of land that I was quite familiar with, somewhere I thought was full of life but not at first glance, I went to Devils Dyke just on the outskirts of Brighton - it is an area of outstanding beauty and is apart of the south downs, so it stands high, towering above the many fields to the north. I took a walk around the edge of the Dyke, taking photos as I went. On the day that I went the weather was quite dull, it was a grey/white sky with no sun breaking through, but I liked this as it gave me the opportunity to use the unusual colours that painters used in Fauvism. I looked through the photos that I took and decided upon the one I used based on the fact that in my vision I split it into quarters and I thought each section would work well as a separate piece as well as the original image as a group, this takes me to the next influence on my piece, David Hockney, who was initially known as a pop artist, he had success with pieces such as 'A bigger splash' but in more recent years he has been making landscape paintings, these have varied in size some being absolutely massive while others being not so large. Hockney's landscapes were subject to an exhibition for the royal academy which consisted entirely of Hockney's landscapes and nothing else, we saw a documentary on this and how he created some of these, for instance he uses an Ipad to draw some of the landscapes and then enlarges them on a print. The way he paints his landscapes that interests me though is the way he presents them on a series of canvas' allowing the separation of a landscape artwork and making smaller, somewhat more abstract pieces.
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Painting no. 3
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The first thing I needed to decide when painting these was how I was going to paint them, I had decide upon my image and had printed it in colour on the top half of a sheet of a4. At first i considered painting from this rather small image but then i thought if I'm to paint this cut up image on 4 different canvas' from hand then it won't be very accurate and they might not even much up, so I printed this image on the a4 paper onto a sheet of acetate, so i could project the image and accurately copy the main shapes in the picture, I did this to keep a realistic element in the image.
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| Painting no. 4 |
I set up an aisle and a projector, placed the canvas on the aisle, before painting any detail onto the first canvas I mixed up a vibrant greeny-yellow mix (going back to Fauvism) and spread this across the first and second canvas, as they are the top ones, this was going to be the skyline colour. Once the background for painting no. 2 had dried I began to paint the details of the trees which were being projected onto the canvas, for these thick tree branches I mixed a reddy-brown to keep a warmth in the colour. After painting in most of the detail in painting no. 2 i did a quick red wash over areas of shrubbery and then added watered down shades of blues of and yellows to add a bit more depth and interest.
On painting no.1 the majority of the painting was completed with the background, but there was a bit of detail at the bottom, achieved using the same processes I had gone through with painting no. 2, I felt this was a very important canvas of the group, as it broke up the other three slightly with the sheer amount of blank space, instead of blocking up the view with details, I like to think of this as the mellow canvas.
Paintings no. 3 and 4 were made using a different approach, although I started them similarly, doing a dull yellow, then intense paint wash for the background. But when I projected each image on each canvas they weren't very clear at all, in fact I could only make out the dark footpaths so I painted the parts of the image that i could see clearly, i finished the rest of both paintings using just the original print out of the picture i took to paint from, allowing me to be alot more free with my painting style, as well as using unusual colours.
Overall I'm happy with my final outcome for this project, if I were to improve on it, I would spent more time planning on how I would go about painting it. I would also look further into depth on my influences, so that I would have alot of knowledge to go by when using certain techniques and processes. I'm happy with how my actual paintings turned out, despite the latter two not going to original plan, I think as a composition they work well, each canvas Ad's it's own mood and energy to the picture.
In my opinion I've achieved what I set out to, I took a lifeless photo and filled it with colour and atmosphere, I say the photo is lifeless, but what I mean is that has hints of life here and there, but I've exaggerated these patches so it fulls the entire image.
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| The Photo i choose for my final piece, Devils Dyke. |
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