Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko is one of the most renowned artists of his time. I remember the first time I saw a Rothko painting in person. I was by myself at the Pompidou in Paris (which in itself was set up to be an amazing experience.) Walking through the museum I was brought to a halt when I looked up and saw, Untitled (black, red over black on red), 1964. Of course I knew of the beauty and the amazement of Rothko’s work but seeing it in person was a new extreme. Rothko has the ability to make a seemingly simple painting command to be looked at - its size, beauty and mastery of color is something you can’t avoid.

I am always intrigued when certain works have benches placed in front of them - what is it about those pieces that require sitting when looking at and others don’t?  I finally understood the need for benches. With a piece like Rothko’s, it deserves, and requires more time to fully appreciate and take in the amazement of it. I felt utterly overwhelmed and at a loss for words when looking at his paintings. There is something about his paintings, the vastness, and the ability for something (usually)  monochrome to cause such a physical and emotional reaction that completely pulls me in. I took advantage of the bench that sat in front of the painting and took it in. Not only do the aesthetic elements of the painting captivate me, but it’s hard to look past the fact that you are face-to-face with a Rothko, amazing to have a star struck feeling come from a piece of art.

An abstract expressionist painter, Rothko is known for his large-scale paintings, many which are monochrome and have similar features to color blocking. Rothko’s color field paintings created a “chromatic language” for his audience, using the power of color to create an emotional and visceral reaction for his viewers.The power and emotion embedded in the color red comes through the painting and resonate within me, creating the ultimate “wow” moment. The technical abilities Rothko displayed through his paintings are impossible not to recognize. The looseness he holds with the paint, the hidden brush strokes, the look of ease yet so much precision, and the blending of the paint and varying colors make for a seamless piece. Rothko has the ability to produce what appears to be a still piece of work, and bring it to life, standing under the paintings they seem to move and breathe along with the viewer.

FInal Blog

“Big picture,” is my dad’s favorite phrase, which he can apply to any and all situations. To him, looking at things from a more omniscient point of view is best in order to be successful. I only half agree. It is important, sure, but it is the small things that shape the larger world that make things interesting. Perception refers to the process of taking in sensory input from our environment and sorting the information into pre-established files in our brains. This information is later retrieved in order to identify and interpret the world around us and form reactions to it. When I saw Jim Campbell’s work, I knew that the direction I was heading in with my final project was the right one. It combines my passion for the brain and the way it works to process information and form the knowledge we acquire over the years. However, sometimes our own senses betray us and may interpret sights in ways that are as wacky and puzzling as can be. 

Campbell’s work at the gallery we visited delves into the concept of visual perception and twists it to a new limit that leads us to question our very own minds. He explores the limits, or boundaries, of perception, emphasizing its uncertainties and consequently blurs the framework between reality and imagination to the point of abstraction. He achieves this through the manipulation of distance, time, and the resolution of images. As technology steadily advances and we struggle to keep up with the latest innovations, Campbell retreats in the opposite direction and plays the videos of crashing waves in the lowest possible resolution to distort the viewer’s perception, forming an abstraction of the original image. The abstraction is so different and such a unique experience that it does not fit within the files of our mind. It belongs in its own category, one of question and wonder, one of uncertainty, as the name of the exhibition states. By reducing the image to a series of blurry lights and shadows and progressively slowing the video, the notions of understanding are manipulated to the extent that the viewer no longer understands what he/she is looking at.   

           

I drew inspiration from surrealist artists that create worlds of confusion and wonder by taking what we know and changing it to different dimensions, offering a look into the relationship between the known and the unknown. The world seems to come to life when looked at up close, however when you take a step back and see the bigger picture, you can see that something is not quite right about the image. You are not actually looking at the image you thought. By distorting the scale I was able to create a playful, yet confusing composition that inspires a second glance to understand what is going on. I created a world within a puddle; a world that tells a story. Placed in a linear fashion, the three-piece artwork explores the battle between what is real and what is fabricated within our own imagination. On the one hand, we can mold and shape our own world, folding our lives to be what we want them to be, only to have to face the conflicting realities around us. The subtle aggression that the soldiers convey hint that something is not right about this world. The viewer is placed from the perspective of the aggressor, keeping their guard up, but is that really where we want to be? I overcame the struggle of perfectionism by being free when approaching the background and the reflections on the water; my work explores the concept of perception not by movement but by the distortion and play of scale. My final project allowed me to play with ideas of perception, to explore my excitement for interpretation and confusion through subtleties and scale.

Julia Lambright Artist Statement and Final Blog

For my final series, I decided it was finally time to step out of my comfort zone and try something I never had tried before: abstraction. I have always been fascinated by photorealism and achieving apparent perfection in my work, but I have noticed that while this style of painting intrigues me, it also limits me as I begin my career as an artist. I never really considered trying any other style, as I deemed photorealism to be my “thing” before I even experimented with other techniques. Therefore upon deciding on the path I wanted to take for this series, I felt a bit of reluctance and nervousness.

I wanted the focus of my paintings in this series to not only be on the end product, but also on the process that went into creating it. I was particularly interested in marbling and the effect that it gives the paint, but I needed to figure out a way to achieve this same effect with oil paints. In order to do this, I used a mixture of both oil and acrylic paints, and guided them together on the canvas allowing them to intermix and react with each other.

Creating these paintings was very different than the other pieces I have worked on in the past primarily because of the feeling that came along with the process. There is no question that I enjoy painting, but I would not describe my usual tedious process as necessarily “fun”. Therefore this alternative style allowed me to be messy and spontaneous, and made the process of painting a lot more lighthearted than what I am used to. And the aspect that was most appealing to me overall was that in the end, although I coaxed and directed the paint to do what I wanted, ultimately the resulting piece was somewhat out of my control.

The artist that I chose to focus on as a reference for this project is Joan Mitchell. Mitchell was an American artist known for her abstract expressionist paintings. She was one of her era’s few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim for her work, and her paintings can still be seen in museums and galleries around the US and Europe. Her primary medium for painting was oil on canvas, and as stated before, she worked in abstraction, taking inspiration for her pieces in her surrounding landscape, personal relationships, or other major life events. As her painting career progressed over the years, she also began to paint series of works on multiple panels, each single work within the series repeating and mirroring the structure of the others. This was particularly applicable to our final project as we are doing just that: creating a series of works that join together in a common theme.

One other thing I find interesting about Mitchell is that she is said to have stood back from her paintings for long periods of time studying them and intricately planning out each stroke, but she was also then able to approach the painting and make quick, confident strokes. She has an exceptional ability to blend and mix colors that compliment each other, and her strokes are beautiful and sure. All of these details are admirable in a painter, as they show she both has the natural abilities to control the medium and she puts in the critical thought to get her desired message and effect across.

Artist Statement

For my final painting project, I created a serious of abstraction of the four elements - earth, water, fire and air. Four 3x3 canvases explore the geometric and organic patterns existing in nature through both a micro and macro lens. I like to explore abstraction through organic elements in nature and it only felt appropriate to do so with the four elements. Although all natural materials, the patterns that exist combine both ambiguous lines, textures and shapes, and also very subtle geometric forms. My four pieces played along with the aspects of the abstract and the real, and the patterns that exist within that.

My exploration of air, water, fire and earth was fairly arbitrary, as those labels are extremely broad, and encompass the entire planet. As the possibility for me to properly display “earth”, with all of the opportunities that entails in one painting is fairly impossible. Each painting is an intimate moment with one small section of each element. An close up look at all four pieces that make up our world. My paintings allow a pause in time, bringing this vast elements down to something tangible, creating an intimate interaction with something so vast.

A huge inspiration for this piece was Georgia O’Keefe. I have always been drawn to her work and her painting style, as her subject matter, color palette, and painting style are things I also align myself with as an artist. O’Keefe’s landscape paintings play with the idea of the macro and micro, creating abstractions of deliberate locations and subjects, yet still are devoid of the details that create specificity. She is able to create landscapes that give the viewer the reference of some form of familiarity without creating a specific place - allowing each viewer to engage in an intimate moment with each painting. O’Keefe’s use of brush strokes are impeccable. The smooth blending along with minimal textured lines create amazing contrast and variance throughout all of ver landscapes. She is able to create a sense of calm, femininity, and natural beauty within all of her work. The aspects of her painting practice are the things I aimed to create in my final painting series - the ideas of intimate moments, landscape abstraction, and the room for interpretation involving the macro and the micro.

coop artist statement

My final trilogy of 3’ x 5’ foot paintings depict abstract landscapes using a wide variety of colors and distorting realistic perspective. Each of the landscapes were inspired by places in nature from my home, although none of them directly represent these places. I have a very specific interest in observing the colors of the sky at sunset and how they change and evolve through the process. This is where I find inspiration for my color choices. The three different landscapes share a wide breadth of warm and cool colors. Using a unique color palette to depict landscapes was an effort to portray the idea of a fantasy or dream-like place. Although the tree, the ocean and the hills of fields are recognizable as those things, the unlikely use of color is supposed to make the viewer second-guess what exactly they are seeing. This was my attempt to distort reality. Another reason I use so many colors is because it is a form of expression and a way to offer insight into how I approach life with acceptance of others and self-awareness.

Landscapes are part of ecosystems and provide habitats for so many forms of life. Nature is an interconnected whole that I enjoy exploring and being a part of. It has provided me with happiness as well as places to escape to. The trilogy emulates these places. I think nature can be humbling through its beauty and life. The paintings were made in layers using turpentine as the primary medium in the first layer. I then added layers of paint highly concentrated in medium but still using a lot of turpentine. Towards the final layers I made many areas of the landscapes opaque to contrast areas that were disturbed with turpentine and then layered over. The combination of smooth blending opaque colors on top of distressed turpentine drippings creates variety and. The contrast between beauty and distress is also representative of life itself and the power of nature to be beautiful but also harmful. The paintings are each unique but flow together because they share similar colors. Within each painting the lines that make up the physical plane are blended in a way that offers continuity and interconnectedness.

One artist that I have now researched more of their work because of this project is Edvard Munch. Known for his painting Scream, I was not aware of his landscape work. He was relevant to my final series because he also uses unique colors and depicts abstract landscapes. I like his work because he will give indications of perspective and depth with horizon lines and size of objects but then other areas are distorted and appear flat. I did similar things in my trilogy with the turpentine drippings. I wanted to leave some of the textures raw and visible so I used lean layers of paint to add depth but still allowing the viewer to observe the textures.

Klimt and My Artist Statement

The artist who inspired me the most on my final project is Gustav Klimt. He was an Austrian Symbolist painter who lived from 1862 to 1918. In many of his paintings, he focuses on the female body as his subject, surrounded by many marks of different colors and textures. Inspired by Japanese art, his paintings have a stylistic use of lines, a very flat, two dimensional depiction of the subject and an attention to detail. I have always been inspired by his draftsmanship; his use of lines is sensual and loose yet very frank and direct. It makes his subjects look mysterious. I also admire his painting style, how he fills each and every corner of his painting with detail. As a Symbolist artist, the colorful marks he make in his paintings stand for something. In a way, Klimt’s art has influenced me to use symbolism in my project as well.

My three paintings depict a self portrait of myself, curled up in a blanket, sleeping. Sleep is a very important subject to me because of my love/hate relationship with it. I love to sleep when I am tired, and I am usually always tired because of sleep deprivation, but often times, I cannot fall asleep because I would think of all the things I could be doing in the hours I spend sleeping.

I am interested in the use of aromatherapy, how different flowers affect sleep. Having used Chinese aromatherapy a couple of times and I was surprised that it somewhat works. The different smells of different flowers calms you, makes you think of different things in your sleep. For example, the cherry plum allows the mind to surrender to slumber, the morning glory helps to adjust your sleeping schedule and the chestnut helps to make the sleeper feel safe and supported. Even though these descriptions are maybe too good to be true, I'm interested in how different smells shape dreams. Dreams can seem like real life, except for a few changes or bizarre occurrences, such as when the flowers start to flow out of your blanket.

The image that I am trying to portray is split into three parts, each on three different sized canvases. I wanted to use three different sized canvas because I wanted to play with the size of different spaces I could use to depict a part of a whole picture. The biggest canvas that I made is 3x5 ft, and it contains the head and an arm of the sleeping subject. The second canvas is 3x3 ft, which contains the drifting arm of the subject. The third and smallest canvas is 3x2 ft and it contains the feet peeking out from under the blankets. I picked three types of flowers to focus on, the first one being the cherry plum, the second being the morning glory and the third being the sweet chestnut. I wanted to show a surrealistic scene of myself sleeping, dreaming of the therapy I am undergoing in order to adjust my bad sleeping habits.

James Jean and Artist Statement

Recently I have been invested in James Jean’s work and his abstraction and freedom of creating his own environments in art.  In his work, there is a lot of fluidity of creating different planes and having them intersect whether they be figures or fluid stokes resembling a landscape. In my final, I aimed to be more relaxed in my stokes and trust experimentation with paint as well as allowing the viewer to understand my work rather than spelling it out for them.

In Jean’s pieces, he has detail to the point of abstraction. I find myself getting caught up in realism and the detail behind it, that I sometimes lose my creativity in painting. Comparing myself to Jean, I hope to create a focused color pallet with fluid stokes and still maintaining a solid idea and narrative behind it.  

With his work, there is an openness to interpretation from all viewpoints, which makes it all the more compelling. I personally tried to incorporate size and shape into my pieces just as much as the paint itself. Through this, I hope to take the viewer away into this mental world that they can decided the narrative and easily attach their own beliefs to.  

When it comes to Jean’s techniques, the smoothness of his pieces are impeccable. To incorporate that into my work, I tried to play with the balance of my pieces. By having 4 be skewed but equal in overall size, I was very conscious of having a balance of imagery. On my side panels, which were almost the most difficult part, I had to really know how to step back and not overdo anything. Especially the experimentation of them, I found myself at times trying to do more than I had to and catching myself in the act. Overall, this collection was a personal challenge but with this inspiration in the back of my mind, I was focused enough to try to change myself to better serve the vision.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Over the years, I have come to realize that my art always has a narrative. Telling stories is my passion whether it is through acting, art, or something in-between. Having the opportunity to create my own stories and share experiences or feeling that can somehow be communicated universally is something I strive for.

With this collection, the focus of religion and how it seems to have been a universal feeling and belief for thousands of years was extremely important. The fact that millions are faithfully dedicated to a form of afterlife spanning over so many different religions is something magical. With that, I chose to explore the relationship between an unearthly “good place” and “bad place”. However, abstracting them, I wanted to highlight there are always hidden negatives and positives to every situation and setting.

Being inspired by the true definition of sublime, “the [beautiful] … does not invite such contemplation but instead is an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer (Arthur Schopenhauer)”, I wanted to represent the other sides of Heaven and Hell that can cause confusion and doubt with previously conceived notions like many situations that are faced in everyday life driven to the extreme.