Compare and Contrast task

Cindy Sherman - Untitled No. 224 (Bacchus)

1990

Frida Kahlo - Self Portrait with Cropped Hair

1940

Both pieces are androgynous self portraits of the artist in male dress but are radically different in style and composition. The piece by Cindy Sherman is a reworking of Caravaggio's Sick Bacchus, with an almost identical pose, composition and use of still life. The piece uses a photograph which is manipulated to resemble the style of the original painting. Through presenting herself as a (male but androgynous) god, Sherman provides commentary on the representation of gender and beauty in art. Bacchus was the Roman god of wine, theatre and intoxication, and in ancient times was often depicted in female dress himself, giving this piece further layers of meaning and irony.

Kahlo's piece reflects similar themes but in a more aggressive, immediate manner. She depicts herself in an oversized dark suit, with a dark red shirt, apparently masculine clothing. Her hair, which is usually shown long, is cropped short with the cut hair draped over the chair she sits on and around the background. She looks masculine, but her hands and head seem too small compared to the large suit, giving her a fragile, frail look. It's as though her femininity is being constricted and controlled by masculine trappings. Kahlo was well-known for depicting herself with "unfeminine" features, notably thick eyebrows and facial hair, but more frequently paints herself wearing traditional Mexican female dress, so depicting herself in male dress is something of a shock.

Kahlo's self portrait reflects the issue in a more immediate way: the hair and the clothing make it clear that she is a woman dressed in a male way, whereas Sherman's piece is not immediately obvious as a self-portrait, she looks deceptively masculine. As such, Sherman's piece is more subtle, it requires a passing knowledge of art history to fully understand its layers. Kahlo's piece includes a line of musical notation and two lines of a Mexican song which have a similarly referential tone, but the piece can be understood clearly without that knowledge.

Interview documentation

This is some of the information I got from my sitter, Luna, for the portrait project.

Name: Luna

Age: 17

Favourite colour: blue

Nationality: Swiss

Hobbies: skiing, drawing

Ambitions: would like to be a fashion accessory designer

favourite style of music: pop

Favourite genre of film: action/blockbuster

Any pets? No, she has allergies.

Portrait Project Final Piece

Unfortunately I forgot to bring in my camera so I don’t have progress shots for this one.

 Final piece background

I started off with the background, mixing a pale brown and then painting over it with gesso to give it a paler tone and to make it easier to paint over. Then I painted in the background, stating with the sky and the mountains, then adding the foreground, the village and the white details of the snow and the clouds. I painted the foreground in a very thin wash and allowed the paint from the foreground to run to give the background a loose, expressive feel. I took a bit of inspiration from the Dan Bayles paintings I'd looked at in the treatment of the landscape, because I wanted it to have a similarly ethereal feel as his work does. The clouds and the village I painted in much thicker paint so they would stand out and to add to the painterly, expressive effect I wanted to give the background.

The foreground, the portrait itself, proved a lot more difficult. I tried to trace the rough positions of features using an overhead projector but things kept jogging it making it difficult to put things in the right place.

With my first attempt at painting the portrait, I added a layer of black stippled shading to try to capture the shadow in the photograph, but that didn’t seem right. My second attempt turned out like this (after several re-tries with the eyes, nose and lips).

The eyes still need some work and the lips were in the wrong place, but the style of the shading was better, especially around the nose.

With a bit more work it ended up like this. I’m still not entirely happy with the eyes or the mouth but it looks less chubby and the shading looks a lot less harsh. I’m particularly happy with the nearer eye and the light on the earring. For the shading and blending here, I wnet back and looked at some of the artists I'd researched and how they treated blending in skin. I took a lot of inspiration from Guy Denning, not in the colours but in the way he uses his brushstrokes and little flecks of different colours to create a varied tone.

As I say, I'm not completely satisfied with the result, but since I've never tried painting in a realistic style before I'm fairly pleased with bits of it.

Interesting styles of painting

More research for th portrait project.

Frank Auerbach

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Auerbach is a German-born artist living and working in Britain. His style of painting is fascinating: really thick impasto oils applied and then scraped back. He doesn't use underlayers or sketches, he goes straight into the painting itself. I think that helps add the immediacy his work has. You can't really see in reproductions, but the paint is applied so thickly it almost gives the impression of a relief, with a very tactile quality.

My own photo from Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. I've got to admit, it took me a few moments and a few steps back to realise that this was a portrait (and I felt a bit of a fool) but once I realised, I was amazed by the depth of emotion and character Aurebach could show with just a few strokes.

Mikhail Larionov

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Larionov was a Russian avante-garde painter who was closely involved in the Russian Neo-Primitive movement which combined cubism with traditional folk art. He was an important figure in the Russian art world, and a founder member of some important groups. There's a definite influence of Van Gogh and Picasso in the bold outlines and bright colours he used, but there's a warmth to his work that I've not seen in Cubism. Perhaps its the colours, but there's something oddly friendly about his work.

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Dan Bayles

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Bayles is an American landscape painter. There's something strangely architectural about his paintings. To me they feel like fantasy landscapes, they seem to show impossible places that hang in the air. I really like his use of vertical and horizontal lines, they give his work a graphic feel.

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Gerald Davis

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Davis is an American artist who largely paints cartoonish monochrome pieces based on his own memories of childhood and puberty. There's a precision to his paintings that give them the appearance of drawings, but the muted colours lend a sense of memory and longing.

Notes from a trip to the Saatchi Gallery

Last week we had a trip to the Saatchi gallery. I’ve got to say I was a little disappointed, not with the work on show, but with the way it was exhibited. I don’t know, perhaps artists want their work to be displayed in cold, white, clinical box-like rooms, but I find it makes me feel uncomfortable and detracts from the experience of whatever piece I’m looking at. I find I can’t get involved in a piece in the same way. It’s hard to really take in a piece when you’re feeling self-conscious and exposed. But that’s a rant for another day.

Anyway, there were some really interesting pieces. The current exhibition is looking at contemporary sculpture, and there seems to be a bit of a trend towards viscerally unfinished-looking pieces, full of drips and raw edges. I’m putting a few notes and pictures of a few of the pieces that really struck me below. All of the pictures are ones I took myself on the day, the names of the artists are included above, with links to their pages on the Saatchi website. The pictures are purely to illustrate my notes, no copyright infringement is intended.

Dirk Skreber

There’s something really disturbing about these. Carnage as sculpture. It reminds me of some of the darker aspects of human nature, the morbid curiosity that makes people stare at horrific car accidents as they drive by. Putting such horrific accidents in a gallery environment says something really interesting about that habit.

Sterling Ruby

These are so visceral, particularly the darker red one. The dripping wax has a raw, gory feel to it that’s quite unsettling, but the architectural forms evoke urban landscapes.

Rebecca Warren 

Seeing such cartoony, exaggerated forms in three dimensions is interesting. To me it highlights the differences between reality and caricature. They focus on and exaggerate features that have been fetishised by male sculptors for centuries, which gives them a quirkily feminist edge. Plus, they’re really amusing!

Folkert de Jong

The white eyes are really creepy! I love the unfinished foam, it looks as though it’s impaled the figures.

Roger Hiorns

I like the way the copper sulphate seems to be growing across the models like some sort of alien mould. The models themselves look rather like the cut-out ones you can buy, which gives these pieces a subversive repurposed feel.

Thomas Houseago

I like the hunched pose, it makes it seem as though the figure is bent under some incredible burden. The sketchily drawn-on expression emphasises this feeling. The unfinished quality of the drawing and the roughly formed plaster, give the piece a primordial feel, as though the figure has stepped out half-formed.

Berlinde De Bruyckere 

Another disturbing piece. The detail in the lower body and torso contrast with the vague, almost Lovecraftian quality of the mass that replaces the figure’s head. The pale colouring of the flesh tones gives it a sickly, dead quality. The way the chest has caved in adds a brittle quality, but there’s a flow to the tendrils that fall down between the arms. Really interesting piece.

David Altmejd

An abstract figure made of fur and reflection. Really interesting use of texture. It seems sort of tactile (though obviously I didn’t touch it!). There are little bits of fool’s gold on the mirrored steps, which makes me think of a journey through life, drawn to things that are valueless and missing things that are importance.

 Another piece that can best be described as "visceral". A mixture of explicit sexuality and violent dismemberment (I love the details of the exposed spine, shattered heads and swirling innards!) but with pale, almost pastel colours and exposed plaster. I like how the treatment of the plaster reflects the violent energy of the scene, and how the figures are not quite human, with their wings, multiple arms and shattered bodies. They seem more like personifications of sexual energy than human figures.

Martin Honert

I’m not normally much of a one for large pieces, but these definitely had an impact in real life. They tower over you at about one and a half times life size. The level of detail in the face and hands is amazing, and I like the combination of modern clothing with the traditional concept of the giant (complete with walking stick).

Joanna Malinowska

This reminds me of early Mediterranean figurines. In the Bronze Age, Cypriot potters made a lot of figurines of bulls that have a similar shape, though this is much larger and has a (deliberately) cruder finish. Apparently it's based on traditional figurines from Mali, it certainly has an earthy ethnic feel.

 Bjorn Dahlem

I love the use of negative space here. Though the construction is fairly simple, being able to see between the struts to the lights beyond gives a sense of complexity and depth.

Interesting BBC documentary

The BBC are doing a new series that looks at attribution of works, possible fakeries and how one goes about proving a painting is by a famous painter. The first episode was on earlier today and it looked at a painting that may or may not be by Monet. In the process of trying to work out whether the painting is genuine, the programme goes into some detail about Monet's painting style and the techniques scientists and art historians can now use to examine works. It also highlights some rather unsavoury aspects of the attribution process.

You can see it on iPlayer via the link above.

Reclaiming the "Before" Body - Portraits of womens' torsos

This is a interesting project by Clarity Haynes: a series of portraits of women's torsos intended to normalise the frankly normal bodies used in advertisements for cosmetic surgeries and diet plans.

Here's part of  her statement from the website:

 

"Historically, the painted portrait signifies prestige, beauty and social power.  I choose to portray women's real bodies, which are often invisible in this culture.

The face is our commonly recognized self – our “mask” of identity. Focusing exclusively on the torso shines a light on a part of the individual that is usually hidden. Each torso bears traces of unique personal experience: tattoos, childbirth, aging, stretchmarks and surgical interventions.

...

The sitter's choice to have a portrait done is a courageous act of self-revelation. Portraiture involves participation, collaboration and even performance."

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 Apparently Haynes has now produced over 500 of these "breast portraits", although only a small selection are shown on the website (there are also a selection of photographs of the models with their finished portrait and short statements about the process, which are interesting). 

Found via Sociological Images

Contemporary Portraiture

In my last post on portraiture I was focusing rather on ancient and historic portraiture, this time I'm going to look at some contemporary (or at least 20th century and onwards) artists' work.

Lucian Freud

Freud was born in Berlin in 1922, the grandson of the famous neurologist Sigmund Freud and the brother of the late writer and politician Clement Freud. The family moved to England in the 1930s to escape the rise of the Nazi party. Lucian studied at Goldsmith's College UCL and began working as an artist in 1943, when he was comissioned to produce a series of illustrations for a book of poems by Nicholas Moore. His early work tended towards surrealism, with curious juxtapositions of plants and animals, but in the 1950s his style changed into what he is now famous for: expressive but realistic depictions of people, often nudes. In the 1970s he became involved with a group of artists, later called the "School of London", including Francis Bacon who painted several portraits of Freud.

Freud's later work is typified by portraits and nudes. He uses thick impasto and muted colours, and is famous for his penetrating psychological depictions of his sitters, who are frequently family members and close friends. His unusually frank depictions of his sitters had made him a very contraversial figure. Some critics despise him, while newspapers are suspicious of his motives, particularly in the case of his paintings of Sue Tilley, such as Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (below)

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Painted in 1995, the painting was sold for a record price in 2008, bringing it huge media attention. It is typical of Freud's style. A varied selection of flesh tones applied heavily gives the impression of uneven skin tone, cellutie and scars. We look down on the couch, giving it a distorted feel, and creating the uncomfortable feeling that the viewer has happened upon the sleeping figure. Her face seems contorted, as though troubled in dreams, but her pose seems comfortable, with her legs tucked beneath her and one arm bracing herself against the couch. Some critics have seen the painting as a cruel attack on obsetity, but I think it's more an attack on society's views on body image; the frankness in the detailing and the intimacy of the pose pull us closer to the model than some would like.

Interestingly, despite attacks on Freud's attitude to the sitter, the sitter herself seems very pleased and very comfortable with the painting as you can see from interviews such as this and this.

Some more examples of Freud's paintings can be seen here.

Francis Bacon

Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909 to English parents, but the family moved to London at the outbreak of the First World War. Prone to allergies and asthma, Bacon recieved very little schooling. While traveling in Europe, he visited an exhibition of Picasso's paintings and decided he would like to become a painter himself. On returning to London, he worked as an interior designer for a while, making sketches and entering competitions (when he tried to submit work for a surrealist show but was told his piece was "insufficiently surreal), before finally capturing public attention with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). He became well known for his disturbing, deformed take on figurative painting and continued to produce challegning works until his death in 1992. For more about his life and his attitudes to his work, here's an excellent edition of the South Bank Show from 1985, with some very interesting interviews with him.

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Bacon produced many unusual portraits. He believed that deconstructing a sitter's physical form was the only way to capture their true character. In an age when photography could capture how things appear, Bacon beleived that painting should capture deeper meaning. He also liked to work from pieces from history (if you watch the South Bank Show episode, you'll note he talks a lot about ancient work (such as Egyptian art and Greek plays) and the "masters") as can be seen in his portrait based on the life mask of William Blake and his Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X:

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 Bacon produced many different studies for this piece, using largely the same colour pallette (purples, greys, blacks and yellow) and similarly extreme (often screaming) facial expressions (for more on some of these other studies, see Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953 published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego). These studies are often considered portraits in their own right, although they cannot really be said to be portraits of Pope Innocent in the classic sense. These are portraits of a particular emotion, more than the subject of Velazquez's painting. Drawing in elements from photographs of distorted figures, film stills and animal studies, Bacon created paintings that seem immediate, human and yet deformed.

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas was born in South Africa in 1953 and studied Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. She then went on to study at the Psychological Institute of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she now lives and works as both an artist and lecturer. Her work, which focuses largely on figures and portraits, has strong psychologial and sexual themes, drawing eroticism and powerful emotions from simple, expressive paintings, as you can see from this selection and analysis from the Saatchi Gallery. She works exclusively from photographs, sometimes including photographs of herself, and often using muted tones and shades of greys, with occassional paintings in brighter tones.

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Thematically, she often draws on contraversial subjects. In 1996 she satirised the beauty industry with an installation entitled Miss World Her 2006 installation Man Kind looked at global terrorism and mistaken identity, and she regularly deals with religion, racism and explicit sexuality.

There's a video here in which Marlene talks about her 2009 retrospective Measuring Your Own Grave. She mentions that she achieves some of her interesting colours through simply not cleaning her brushes.

Another video is here.

Guy Denning

Guy Denning was born in England in 1965, but now lives and works in France. He was a founding member of the Bristol Stuckists group and founded the Neomodern movement in 1997. He frequently uses mixed media in his work, combining stencilled letters with impasto oils, spray paint and cuttings from newspapers and magazines, and he often uses unusually shaped supports created by joining several canvases. The result is work that is expressive and fraught with a sort of vicious physicality. His work is confrontational and highly political.

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Here he is talking about his 2011 show in at the Red Propeller Gallery in Knightsbridge.

And here's footage of him painting works for his 2008 exhibition Celebrity will eat itself

And there are lots more interviews and videos of him at work on his youtube channel.

He also posts drawings on his blog.

 Cristopher Nolasco

Nolasco is not a particularly well known painter, but I stumbled across his work while researching this project and I was really struck by it. Nolasco is a Fillipino-American artist, born in New York in 1976 and studied at California State University. He now lives and works in California as both a painter and a location photographer for film, television and print.

His work combines text, wash and line drawing to create bright, engaging portraits and figurative studies.

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