SB4 (started 29/06/22) continues with the 360-derived paintings as a core activity but I will also be exploring some other modes of engaging with the landscape. I’m building a body of 360-derived work that will go into a show ‘sticks and bones’ planned for St Ives’ Crypt gallery in November. A key point of learning from Morvah show – take the advertising a bit more seriously and provide a stronger written narrative to orient visitors around the work. Other than that, quite decent feedback on the work from visitors.
Focus of this painting is on layering management. A bit more planning in order to layer colour more effectively to create greater dimensionality. I’m leaning towards a heightened sense of colour, halluncinatory quality of early summer foliage etc. I’m also leaning towards that modality as a means of engaging with a folk horror ‘mindset’, translated into a visual language.
Working on the larger painting has focused my mind more on how to construct atmosphere. I’ve been trying various approaches towards taking the painting forward with the aim of creating more mood as well as adding in something that suggests a supernatural energy force/pathway, a key pillar of my approach to my engagement with folk horror thematics. I began with these colour based overlays in photoshop to see what they might do to mood and meaning (mood and atmosphere – are they different things?…no thought required…)
Does the orange do anything to help with energy, mood, and meaning? Is the orange overlay motivated, or ‘stuck on’? Does this constitute jamming of the traditional approach to landscape jamming or is that just conceptual rather than visually motivated? The orange line at least does dialogue with the space constructed in the construction of the picture plane. OK but can I push it further in a more moody direction? A few other colours were played with but the orange seemed more well-knit with the orange of the boule.
Next experiment was to get rid of the orange ‘river’ as it felt too naturalistic – a white version just looked like more water. Referring back to the tree with energy lines ‘Rapture’ image, I went for a more dynamic arcing line with the idea of making that glow. it will needs building up but this is the initial result.
My feeling is that a more tonalist approach is needed to create the kind of atmosphere I am wanting to achieve, I would lose the attention paid to the flattened 360 perspective, but would gain a more mysterious effect. I’ll spend some time looking at more tonalist and emergent work, such as that by Fred Cumming with the aim of informing the next set of paintings (too late for this one and I want to keep pushing this one for now with one more 360 flattened one planned). ‘Midsummer’ paintings seem a good theme to go with at some stage using a more tonalist and emergent approach.
This is a photo but it does have the kind of atmosphere I am looking to achieve in a painting context. The soft transitions, surface unity. What I am doing right now feels more like a cartoon landscape on acid when compared to this. I think I’m a pre-Raphaelite! There are times when I think Holman Hunt’s work also looked somewhat like that too though!
Current doubt…should the building be there at all?
Tanya Krzywinska Art Blog 