Evaluation of my degree piece

My final piece for the degree exhibition is finally finished. Looking back I see similarities with my work in the second year and appreciate the great development that has taken place during my final year at university.

The piece reflects moments and experiences lived in a wide period of time and recollected from memories and photographs.

As for the presentation of the work, I chose something unique. The round structure offers the viewer an unusual experience. The perspective of the painting is profound to a greater degree due to the curvature of the painting. It almost feels like looking through a fisheye lens making the center subject of each view dominant compared to the sides that seem to be much farther away until they disappear. The whole scene completely changes as you walk around.

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Where the two ends of the canvas meet there is a symbolism: the one side is wrapped up to suggest metaphorically that time never stops, there are more to come. Also, it implies the way I was making the painting, on the two scrollers having it wrapped up. I’ve made the joining at a point that my grandfather and I are depicted back to back. I was also named after him so in this way, I suggest the continuation of time and generations.

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Last year final piece34396821_1766657436716835_4707678627687301120_n

Consolidation Summative Assessment Post Subject Module ADZ6333

Panorama1 high plus

  • Documentation

Painting Technique

The background of my work

The significance of pictures and  videos in my practice, bracketed by an interview of Bill Viola

Exploration and understanding the concept of my work

reduced 2 Panorama edited

  •  Contextualisation:

Atlas Richter

Lisa Reihana, “Emissaries”

Emile Zola

Pierre Bonnard

Contextualisation of ideas that influenced the style of my final artwork

Documentation of the process of making the Degree show piece

As I have decided to present my painting on a cylindrical column I had to design and make it from scratch. It was a demanding task that required precision in order to come out at the exact size and shape needed. The first stage was measuring and designing the column. After that, I ordered the separate pieces. Putting it all together was not hard but it took me 4 days to complete as there were many parts and I wanted a smooth, perfect finish to the surface.

I was very satisfied with the result. The construction looked professional and ready to host my painting.

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Natalia Goncharova

Goncharova challenged the limits of artistic, social and gender conventions, and by the age of 32 had established herself as a leader of the Russian avant-garde. Many of the artist’s early paintings are inspired by the peasant life and culture of her native Tula province in Central Russia. I like the simple geometric forms, the bold colours and the powerful compositions. There are no details to attract attention and that makes the figures look more dominant.

inv_11955Peasants Picking Apples 1911, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Received from the Museum of Artistic Culture 1929 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.

Goncharova’s artistic output was immense, wide-ranging and at times controversial. She paraded the streets of Moscow displaying futurist body art and created monumental religious paintings. She took part in avant-garde cinema, experimented with book designs and designed for fashion houses in Moscow and Paris.

Her bold and innovative body of work influenced and transcended the art movements of the 20th century. The exhibition will explore her diverse sources and inspirations, from Russian folk art and textiles to the latest trends in modernism and beyond.

D4935392rNatalia Goncharova Picking Apples

Tate. (2019). Natalia Goncharova – Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate. [online] Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/natalia-goncharova [Accessed 2 May 2019].

Professional Development during Easter

Commissioned work

2 paintings commissioned and made during the Easter break

 

Applications to postgraduate studies

I have applied and accepted so far, for an MFA at University of Arts London, MFA at the University of Arts Canterbury, MA Public Art at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and last but not least looking forward to hearing from SACI Florence.

Participation in competitions

I have submitted five drawings for the Hermione Hammond Drawing Award.

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Contextualization of ideas that influenced the style of my final artwork 

I have been studying many artist’s works and some of them influenced me in the way I work and present my own work. That also led to the formation of my final piece for the degree show

Links to artists/artifacts and concepts I have studied that influenced the way I was working/painting:

Painting Technique

Pierre Bonnard

The background of my work

Technical challenges and thinking concerning my work

A brief history of what came to be known as Panorama.

Christina Troufa

“Agonies” Exhibition

Psychogeography

Photography by other means

David Hockney in Tate Britain

Summer Project

Natalia Goncharova

“My parents”, 1977 by David Hockney

Larnaca Biennale 2018

The most influential concepts I have gained from the Key Concept lecture series, with a brief description of how this has influenced my practice.

Pillars of victory

Pillars of victory, also known as memorial columns were occasionally erected to record the triumphs of victorious achievements of an emperor.

They were built to honor an emperor and generally described a great victory as the Emperor won in the name of the Roman Empire. They thus acted as propaganda in particular, which would show the emperor’s power to the citizens and secure his legacy.

 

depositphotos_85411126-stock-photo-fragment-of-the-column-of.jpgFragment of the Column of Marcus Aurelius.

The spiral picture relief tells the story of Marcus Aurelius’ Danubian or Marcomannic wars, waged by him from 166 to his death. The story begins with the army crossing the river Danube, probably at Carnuntum. A Victory separates the accounts of two expeditions. The exact chronology of the events is disputed; however, the latest theory states that the expeditions against the Marcomanni and Quadi in the years 172 and 173 are in the lower half and the successes of the emperor over the Sarmatians in the years 174 and 175 in the upper half.

column-marcus-aurelius-full.jpgThe Column of Marcus Aurelius in Piazza Colonna

 

 

Ancient Pages. (2015). What Function Did Towering Columns Have In Ancient Rome? | Ancient Pages. [online] Available at: http://www.ancientpages.com/2018/06/02/what-function-did-towering-columns-have-in-ancient-rome/ [Accessed 4 May 2019].

Beckmann, Martin (2002). “The ‘Columnae Coc(h)lides’ of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius”. Phoenix. Classical Association of Canada. 56 (3/4): 348–357.

Zoetrope

The name zoetrope was composed of the Greek root words ζωή – zoe, “life” and τρόπος –  tropos, “turning” as a transliteration of “wheel of life”. The term was coined by inventor William E. Lincoln.

Since the late 20th century, zoetropes have seen occasional use for artwork, entertainment, marketing and other media use, notably as linear zoetropes and 3D zoetropes (see above).

Making a zoetrope has also become a relatively common arts and crafts assignment and a means to explain some of the technical and optical principles of film and motion viewing in educational programs.

f35ea6a1-8485-43b3-8a5c-c3d2d9008935-2060x1236All Things Fall Around The World, Mat Collishaw,  steel, aluminum, plaster, resin, LED lights, electric motor,  Galleria Borghese, Rome, 2014

Of the zoetrope, Collishaw says: “The Massacre of the Innocents painting functions in a very different way to the Caravaggio works I’ve selected. His paintings are solitary and melancholic, whereas the latter thrive on the repetition of characters spread across the canvas. They are designed to excite our emotions and to keep our eyes moving around the surface in an agitated manner without intimacy and with no focal point. The zoetrope capitalizes on this, literally repeating characters to create an overwhelming orgy of violence that is simultaneously appalling and compelling.”

The praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors,[1] placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would, therefore, see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.

s-l640.jpgPraxinoscope Animation Vintage Optical Illusion Toy

“Harper’s Magazine”. Harper’s Magazine Company. 10 April 2018 – via Google Books.

Factum Arte, S. (2014). Factum Arte:: All things fall. [online] Factum-arte.com. Available at: http://www.factum-arte.com/pag/636/All-things-Fall [Accessed 2 May 2019].

A brief history of what came to be known as Panorama.

After doing some research, I discovered many artists and artistic traditions that are connected with the “Panorama” concept. From ancient Chinese drawing on handscrolls made out of bamboo to the painter Robert Barker contriver of the word “panorama” in the 18th century and to Lisa Reihana in Venice Biennale made as animated wallpaper.

qingling-painting.jpgZhang Zeduan, Along the River During the Qingming Festival, 1085–1145, 25.5 cm × 525 cm

One of the most famous artifacts of China is a panoramic painting spreading more than 5 meters wide from the artist Zhang Zeduan. “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”, also known by its Chinese name as the” Qingming Shanghe Tu”, is a painting depicting activities in rural areas and the city, captures the daily life of people and the landscape of the capital, Bianjing (present-day Kaifeng) during the Northern Song. The theme is often said to celebrate the festive spirit and worldly commotion at the Qingming Festival, rather than the holiday’s ceremonial aspects, such as tomb sweeping and prayers. Successive scenes reveal the lifestyle of all levels of the society from rich to poor as well as different economic architecture.

Cross-section-of-the-rotunda_Leicester_Square_panoramaCross-section of the Rotunda in Leicester Square in which the panorama of London was exhibited (1801).

The English itinerant portrait painter Robert Barker coined the word “panorama”, from Greek pan (“all”) horama (“view”) in 1792 to describe his paintings of Edinburgh, Scotland shown on a cylindrical surface, which he soon was exhibiting in London, as “The Panorama”. In 1793 Barker moved his panoramas to the first purpose-built panorama building in the world, in Leicester Square, and made a fortune.

Barker’s accomplishment involved sophisticated manipulations of perspective not encountered in the panorama’s predecessors, the wide-angle “prospect” of a city familiar since the 16th century, or Wenceslas Hollar’s Long View of London from Bankside, etched on several contiguous sheets.

Panorama_of_London_Barker.jpgPanorama of London by Robert Barker, 1792

In Europe, panoramas were created of historical events and battles, notably by the Russian painter Franz Roubaud. Most major European cities featured more than one purpose-built structure hosting panoramas. These large fixed-circle panoramas declined in popularity in the latter third of the nineteenth century, though in the United States they experienced a partial revival; in this period, they were more commonly referred to as Cycloramas.

In Britain and particularly in the US, the panoramic ideal was intensified by unrolling a canvas-backed scroll past the viewer in a Moving Panorama (noted in the 1840s), an alteration of an idea that was familiar in the hand-held landscape scrolls of Song dynasty. Such panoramas were eventually eclipsed by moving pictures. The similar diorama, essentially an elaborate scene in an artificially-lit room-sized box, shown in Paris and taken to London in 1823, is credited to the inventive Louis Daguerre, who had trained with a painter of panoramas.

panorama-mesdag-5-e1499518845600.jpgPanorama Mesdag, by Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Housed in a purpose-built museum in The Hague, the panorama is a cylindrical painting (also known as a Cyclorama) more than 14 meters high and about 40 meters in diameter (120 meters in circumference). late 19th century.

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“Central to the exhibition is the panoramic and cinematic in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015-17. Two centuries ago, the French neoclassical wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique referenced the Pacific voyages of James Cook who documented the transit of Venus in 1769. Reihana populates her vast multi-channel video with real and invented narratives of encounter, harnessing film and animation technologies to reimagine the wallpaper from a Maori and Pacific perspective. Reihana’s practice is driven by a deep connection to community, a working method she describes as kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face). Influenced by indigenous cinema, the work is a meditation on cartographic endeavors, scientific exploration and the colonial impulse which unravels Enlightenment ideals to repture the gaze of power and desire.” (Fossa Margutti, Pietragnoli and Dolzani, 2017)

Asia for Educators, Columbia University. “Life in the Song seen through a 12th-century Scroll”. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011. Retrieved September 29,2011.

history, s. (2019). Robert Barker, Painter of Panoramas – Irish Artists. [online] Libraryireland.com. Available at: https://www.libraryireland.com/irishartists/robert-barker.php [Accessed 1 May 2019].

Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (MIT Press)

En.wikipedia.org. Panoramic painting. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoramic_painting [Accessed 1 May 2019].

Exposure Summative Assessment Post Field Module ADZ6888

Field Module ADZ6888 Exposure

 

  1. Exhibition proposal.

  2. Artistic Practice Statement.

  3. Decisions made towards selecting the work and curating the exhibition. This post will include contextual references (for example exhibitions that influenced the curation/presentation of your Degree exhibition, research on technical aspects, other relevant research).

  4. The dissemination of your work.