Shaun Project Space Crit 3 (Semester 2)
- Lucy Archer
- Mar 31, 2017
- 2 min read
Her work is inspired by modern artists such as Van Gogh and Monet. Her first painting is acrylic on canvas with almost sculptural forms. Tree branches push in front of a white form, similar to that in Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, with blue/green/purple tones in the background. It has a very central composition, with vertical and spiral lines of the braches draw the eye around the painting. Another modernist influence has been used, the background appears to be action painted, linking it to abstract expressionism, but the braches have a very strong post-impressionist style. How the paint has settled on the canvas, its almost a chaotic pointillism style. The fact that she has combined all these genres of painting styles gives her work a post-modernist context also. Due to the sculptural suggestion, this painting has a very strong sense of depth.
Her next piece is made up of 2 wooden panels with blossomed branched covering each. This has a heavy influence of Van Gogh, as several of his works contain blossoms of some description. He was looking at Japanese wood block prints for inspiration for his cherry blossom paintings.
The final painting in the crit was again acrylic on canvas, with a composition of lily pads on a starry space background. The colour palette used for the lily pads is very fresh and expressionistic, and the white spots (stars) in the background reflect them well.
Bex’s work mainly consisted of sculptural pieces based upon the figure. She created these sculptures by stuffing tights with various materials such as tissue and plastic, as proper stuffing was too expensive. One sculpture appeared to be a paper mache head stuffed down a tight leg. The way the material wrapped around and away from the head, movement could almost be seen, like time being pulled at either side. As the nylon stretched over the face distorted it, a lot of angst came with that, it made me think of criminals trying to hide their faces, it added to the mystery of this piece.
Another sculpture was a body without a head resting between two white plinths. This piece I feel stood out the most as unlike her other sculptures, this was the only one with a bright orange fabric, and the rest had very neutral tones. The composition of the body and the plinths made it look like one of the plinths actually became the head, however another more gruesome way to view this would be the head was stuck under the plinth. Either way, the plinths played a large part of this piece despite not being part of the original artwork.
