Reflections on previous units.

I thought it would be helpful to briefly clarify my thoughts from the previous two units in this blog in order to progress. For the research into practice unit I concentrated on place as a starting point, looking at C19 romantic landscape artists who used nature as an inspiration and way to express their emotions. Caspar David Friedrich and Samuel Palmer are two examples of romantic artists for whom nature was an important painterly subject. 

I considered how new technologies have resulted in a move away from nature and landscape towards simulations as expressed by Jean Baudrillard. Tv sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality and Disneyland are all simulations of reality without an origin in actual reality. I drew up the following diagram as a summary of this unit showing the key themes and connections I discovered:

The finished works were drawings and paintings referencing photographs I had taken with nature a prominent feature. I used circular compositions to frame the work although being seen through a window or portal. I hoped to create a sense of disconnected reality, referencing memories and associations that sat between the real and the death of the real that Jean Braudrillard discussed in his essay simulations. 

Within the Award Specific II unit I researched the uncanny in art. The uncanny or unheimlich, is the secret and hidden that has come to light. This may feature in objects and situations containing familiar feelings but also expressing oddity and strangeness. 

I focused on producing three finished paintings using a number of found images collaged together to create new compositions as a reference. Nature and the landscape played a central role in the pieces which contained figures, animals and architecture. The pieces were characterized by bright colours, distorted perspectives and an unfinished quality with the intention of creating a hallucinatory, dreamlike quality. 

Untitled (figures in a cave), oil on canvas

The Great Outdoors, oil on canvas

Continuing to Aspire in the Face of Adversity, oil on canvas

Two prominent themes relating to my practice emerged from this unit. The first was heterotopias defined as real places, neither a utopia nor dystopia where human experience comes together and otherness and identity are intertwined. The second was metamodernism, the oscillation and unification of two opposed poles, modern commitment and postmodern detachment an example of which could be neuromanticism a return to the ideals associated with the romantic movement. This may include ideas relating to the sublime, tragic and uncanny.