Saturday, April 3, 2010

Daily Practice 93/365

Title: "Abstraktes Bild"
(click to view larger)
  
It's an interesting exercise to make images from my watercolour board, or from my paintings. The watercolour board in particular represents unintentional mark making, it having acquired a random collection of colours, shapes, tones from paint that has gone past the borders of the paper that had been pinned to the board. Gerhard Richter always said that he first started painting pictures from snapshots because they lacked self-conscious intent to be made as art objects, but rather served as objects of devotion. He enjoyed the freedom from making compositional decisions by using the photographs as the source for the paintings. He felt that the person who had taken the photograph had already made those decisions. Of course, he did make some decisions regarding blurring of the images to make it clear that they were not photographs, nor were they intended to be faithful renditions of photographs (photo-realistic paintings). He went on to make large scale abstract paintings, and also photographed details of those paintings and made further paintings from the photographs. Cy Twombly has a long history of photographing his and others studios, and making photographs of details of his sculptures and paintings. In taking the photographs, they are intentionally blurred and ultimately are made into photographic "dry prints".

I consider this to be the start of a second phase of exploring this idea of making photographic images from previous work. I want to collect a fairly large number of images over the coming few months, and then evaluate those images to decide how to develop things further.

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