Today I looked at the golden record images again (those available on the site) and really wanted to do something from the 'demonstration of licking, eating, and drinking' one because it is just so peculiar. then I just uploaded the image to procreate and started drawing from it. The thing about digital drawing is that it takes away the difficulty of getting the right tone from a specific area because you can just colour pick it from the pixel - which I don't know if that diminishes the process of 'painting'. I guess it eliminates the sort of 'mistake' freedom from traditional painting (though when I paint I also colour pick digitally, though I have to try to mix that colour by eye) I guess you can be more specific with the colour picking because you can literally pick from every pixel. I found brushes I really like, with the smudging brush as well. I really felt like I was carving this man out of these random colours.
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| the original image sent to space, not as jpeg but in code |
I think, for the rest of it, I'm not going to imitate it that closely, maybe with bigger brushstrokes (something I'm afraid of for some reason, I always use the tiniest brushes in real life and digitally) like this artist I really like I found on instagram who has very photographic works in paint. I really like how you can feel the flash of the camera in his paintings.
http://marktennantart.com/
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| collaged with snow white/cartoon references like janiva ellis. |
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| fragmented, collaged, souvenir/holiday |
The freedom that comes from digital painting is that you don't need a set composition before you start painting - I can move elements around however I want, I can add text and remove layers etc etc. It is very freeing and can be a very playful process. I'm beginning to see that now. I think I'll continue and see what happens. Maybe I can even collage and have a more finished image, ready for painting, and paint it digitally... looking at janiva ellis for reference, I love her work so much, it is so rich with narrative and contradictions in engaging colours.
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| Thrill Issues, 2017 |
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| Something Anxiety, 2017 |
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| collaged from the anime film perfect blue which of course I love. but I like that it is not very recognisable at all, and the colours changed so dramatically. almost a picture in picture. I want to manipulate the image more in this extent. |
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| Hunt, Prey, Eat, 2017 |
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| Dashland Updrown, 2017 |
'..a hand dips an Ellsworth Kelly painting into a cup containing, in miniature, the American actors Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as they picnic in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands. A cartoon – stretched so thin as to be almost anatomically unrecognizable – chases its tail around the cup. The painting’s composition refers to the opening of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), when a hand reaches down to grab a book and the camera trails, for a few seconds, on a glass of water containing baby’s breath. (The colours of the Kelly painting and the flowers are inverted from their originals.)'
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| Bramble's Briar Patch, 2018 |
'Other works are more ambiguous in what, and how, they draw on an existing world of images. Bramble’s Briar Patch (2018) depicts a curtseying young girl dressed as Snow White from the 1937 Disney cartoon; her head is slightly bowed, revealing a shadowed face behind her mask. Her real eyes are barely visible, but her furrowed brow seems to suggest worry.'
[ Janiva Ellis’s Paintings of Bodied and Disembodied States
Ellis’s paintings are spring-loaded with overlapping references to film and television, current events, art and cartoons. ]
Ellis’s work bursts with a bright lust for life as her figures, whether fully fleshed-out or appearing only in outline form, move between embodied and disembodied states – caught, it would seem, mid-transformation. In Thrill Issues (2017) – which was first exhibited at the 2018 New Museum Triennial, ‘Songs for Sabotage’ – the subtle outline of a young girl is interrupted by the laughing, wide-eyed head of another woman. They are both enclosed in a pink and orange, fiery burst, as if they have risen from the surrounding country landscape, Phoenix-like, enthralled by their sudden explosion into painterly existence. To borrow a line from another Ashbery poem: ‘Yes, they are alive and can have those colours.’ But the stakes of these metamorphoses, and of her paintings’ referential drift, intensify when considered in terms of the political and social realities that buffet her human and cartoon subjects. Within many of Ellis’s paintings, the collective and individual histories of trauma that attend to the anti-blackness at the heart of American life coil alongside the levity, however ambiguously rendered, that allows for trauma to be survived.
