Recently the world has become more noisy with political rants, sometimes uselessly or even causing more damage than necessary.
I recently visited an art exhibition at Brandts, in Odense, with a dear friend and it got me thinking about where I want to position myself. Following the advice of one of my previous design teacher and turn my painting activity into a systematic inquiry, true to my subjects. Moreover, looking at the art displayed at the museum and at how it engages with the political debate, I started thinking about what my position is. In general the art was either well or roughly executed. Most of it was aimed at shocking and provoking the visitors, something that has been a "traditional" goal in arts for a very long time, already since the ancient times or Greece and Rome. I am not a confrontational person, even if I have my own views, which might sound sharp at times. I do not enjoy confrontations and upsetting people. The themes that are more dear to my art are: we are nature, we see and reproduce natural forms in our work, but we are also mirrored in natural forms, as natural forms keep recurring for structural and physical reasons. I am thinking in the terms of Darcy Thompson and his views about how natural forms come to be, by effect of a combination of DNA, growth, and physical forces. I love to challenge human vision, capturing the hidden anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms of nature. I see all those forms as showing a rhythm, dancing, contracting and releasing, the emotional and quirky forms that might communicate positive and negative feelings at the same time. However my art is not intended to make people feel bad about themselves or guilty because of our impact on the planet. I would rather wish people would take a minute, think and stop to reconsider about what nature, which also means about who we are as part of nature and in nature we need to live. I wish to spark curiosity about the amazing forms of nature and its evergoing movement and growth. In a way I am informed by Merleau-Ponty's principle of emotional perception and the ongoing retrofitting dynamic, in which we see-think-see and we we might see ourselves reflected in nature. The most appreciated compliments I got during my exhibition at Filosoffen were like: "I think I am going to pay more attention to my rhododendrons during the seasons!" "I have never noticed those forms before (that a rhododendron can look like an elephant when withering), I think I should look more closely!" So I am in my process of creating an imaginary cabinet of curiosity, a naturalistic collection of wonders, whether it is seashells, flowers or leaves and trees, to illustrate not just what they are, but their hidden slow dance, what their forms and tensions might suggest to our eyes.
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Unborn seeds Multiple seeds, multiple people to be. Faces to be known, Noses to be stretching towards the sky, Feeling the many smells in the air, Mouths breaking in between to taste the world. Rolling seeds - redirecting gaze Faces, Noses, and mouths, Rolling around, Tasting the ground, I have no idea what this seed pod is called, but it is gorgeous, with its many profiles and mouths opening in between.
There are so many textures, shades and hidden corners that I still have to process it. I just could not sleep in the past nights, so much to do, so much to worry, so as usual I painted. I dived myself into the waves of the lines texturing this pod and it was a pleasure. it was like meditation, if I stopped thinking what I was doing, I knew I was going to spoil it, so I should not do it: Keep the mind focused! So I tried, sipping my tea, my eyes were running along the tiny line or wrinkle on the pod surface. I focused on the volumes, shadows, patterns and of course the amazing threads emerging from the ruptures on the pod, revealing a series of mouths, opening in between each face. In my palette I tried to balance the dominance warm colours (gamboge, quinacridone gold, burnt sienna, and Van Dyke brown) with colder blue shades (cobalt and phthalo blue). In the "teeth" of the mouths I added some scarlet lake to add an organic, inner tissue quality to the inside of the pod. Tomorrow lecture in Copenhagen, everything ready I hope ;) I leave here the original picture of the seedpod, if you know what it is, please let me know on Instagram og Facebook, comments are not working much anymore Thanks for passing by Bertie Recently I have probably experimented too much, with different types of paper, formats, and different colour brands. My goal was to redefine my art direction, technique and concepts, do illustration, creating cards and paper-based toys to sell online and I got stuck on a series of issues, the worst one was a overdoing things. Other illustrations I am following like Kendyl Hillegas and Koosje Koene have created beautiful videos about overdoing paintings or making "bad art" and actually it has just happened :( As I tried to work with my colouring, the different textures of the paper I was using came in the way and I felt I was not able to control the colour well. So I got to add more water, then I added more colour, and then I left brush strokes I did not want. So I tried to patch things up adding water and trying to remove the excessing water with kitchen paper, as I normally do, but it got worse. My last victim was a painting of a mushroom, a couple of Armillaria Mellea that has showed up on a small grey wall in my garden. I love that mushroom because it has a complex organic form, it seems as an ivory white dolphin and a baby dolphin are emerging from the rim of the hat. Opposite to them, on the other rim of the hat and against the wall, a little ivory figure of a bird trying to fly away. I took a series of picture of this monumental little mushroom and I was ready to go, or so I thought... Here you can see my unfortunate maybe-saved-in-extremis painting and the reference picture. I started with the drawing and already there I had some difficulties. I placed the drawing too low on my paper. So I erased some parts for about 3 times and I lifted the whole subject. Then I have finished the drawing, and started painting. I had some good turns in the past days working wet-on-wet, I controlled well the water and I managed to add layers of colours in the dark areas without spoiling the layers underneath. I was sure I was going to do the same. I was using Hahnemüle cold pressed paper, which I like a lot and I have learnt to use through months of practice. Unfortunately it did not go as well as I hoped.
I started quite early to have too much water on my paper, I added too much colours in various areas and it was becoming a mess. I guess that it is there that a sort of vicious cycle starts of dissatifaction-redoing-dissatisfaction-redoing... until reaching overdoing! It feels like a mathematical limits, a notion of mathematics that I have always found frustrating, depicting a value that a function will never reach, as if it was a function for peace on Earth or you infinite chocolate. As in mathematical limits, I might start adding too much water, too much colours, get it a bit away with blotting paper from a kitchen roll, doing and redoing, hoping to reach that unreacheable value, which I thought I had clear in my mind, without never reach it. Multiple cycles of doing and redoing, painting and repainting, until the painting is overdone! It is incredible how painting might resemble other crafts, especially when involving physical materials. A text written on a computer can be easily reverted, especially when past copies have been saved, with a digital drawing it might still be possible, although issues might arise nonetheless. But painting on paper feels a bit like cooking, when cooking a steak in a pan, if we are not careful we might overcook it, it will become dry and even burnt. When baking a pie or cookies, we have to be careful to reach the "Golden Peak" of pastry, when the surface is actually golden, caramelized and it is at the most delicious stage of baking. But it might slip from pour fingers quite easily, the timer did not ring or we did not hear, and the pastry shifts from golden to brown and overcooked. Well my painting presented overcooked areas, which should have been more golden, especially on the top of the mushroom hat. The area between the back side of the hat became particularly problematic when encountering the rim of the front part of the hat, which is literally too dark and overcooked. Anyway, I tried to save it, as I always do! Any painting is like a little creature to which we dedicate time and devotion. This devotion requires investment of time, hard work, and then those little miracles that now and then we are able to produce with our brush, which I am not sure how to evoke each time, they often emerge and other times they don't. In the end I added a bit more contrast and texture and it is not too bad, but not my favourite job. I ended up dissatisfied and disappointed, in the meanwhile, to release my tension I have focused on my job tasks. I guess I will repaint it from scratch, hoping that one of those small miracles might happen again ;) Thank you for stopping by Bertie Seashells are beautiful. I have always liked as a child, actually also because I loved the seaside and I am happy that living in Denmark nowadays, instead of the mountain or flatland of Piedmont, I am maximum at 30 minutes drive from the sea. However, seashells were special to me for their forms like spirals, round or elongated bivalvia. Even though I have always liked seashells, I did not know how to work with them artistically until last summer. It came natural to me to fantasise about the forms of trees, but not so much of seashells. While last summer I was visiting the beaches of Ajstrupstrand and Saksildstrand, on the coastline south of Aarhus, as well as the coast on the island of Fyn where I live, I started to look more closely at seashells and to collect them together with my husband, who is also interested in natural forms. At the same time, I was challenged by one of my former teachers from my design education to turn my art into an inquiry, more precise and structured, similar to what I do when I do research. And also to let the forms I normally imagine in natural forms, the zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, by themselves through the actual forms of the objects I see. Interestingly I started to collect objects and to look at them as during the time I studied archaeology. All of a sudden seashells became something different. I started to play with them focusing on: negative spaces, rotations on their axes, zooming in and out. In particular I was into broken seashells as they could capture my imagination and became: human broken bones or vertebrae, caves, veiled women, birds, fragments of ancient Greek vases or other strange creatures. Holding a seashell fragment in my hand and rotating it became a form of daydreaming, in which I could reinvent new storylines. The fragments were like an incipit, a preface or introduction to a story that was lost or never came to be, the first lines of a script that needed to be interpreted and unleashed. In this way, I could re-trace and expand these stories leveraging the forms and textures that I could see while holding and rotating a single broken seashell in my hands. Rotating seashells fragments became a "what if" experiment of tracing, creating and weaving the threads of possible storylines for incomplete objects washed by the currents. Here is my last one. A tiny fragment of a bluish spiral shell I have found on Saksildstrand. The first row shows the seashell rotated from three different angles, I applied a third angle rotation to gain each view, trying to keep the vertical angle steady and I gained images that could recall of a broken vase, an old war helmet or a round vase, and finally a duck wrapped in its wings as if was a cape. I rotated my little fragment upside down to gain the forms in the second row, which show two veiled women with a spiral hat, the first one looking up at the sky and the second looking in front of her. I rotated the shell circa of a sixth angle of the circumference of the shell, as I was struck by the female head that I could see when I turned the shell upside down and about "her" persistence when rotating the shell a bit. The lines of fracture of the shells were of a dark reddish colour, which I found interesting as it looked like a healed wound revealing a stripe of dried blood. I wanted to represent this fracture line, as it links my shell fragment back to the little animal that inhabited it, as seashell are in fact the tiny homes of sea creatures. I deliberately used a limited palette of colours for this piece: French Ultramarine Blue, Van Dyke brown for the shell body, Lake Magenta, Rose Doré and French Ultramarine for the fractures. I wanted to explore how few hues were enough to communicate the rich nature of this tiny shell. This second piece was complicated, I don't think I have never got it right, nevertheless I think I have still made some progress. It represents three angles of another fragment of a spiral seashell from Ajstrupstrand. The fragment was broken on its horizontal axis, as if it was cut through at a third of its section. As I started to rotate it in my hands to find some inspiration, about which stories the inside of this little fragment could tell. I noticed that by rotating this fragment by a third I could see the rough forms of three animals emerging and I made a series of attempts to represent them. Starting from the first drawing from the left, I could see: an owl, an elephant and a long-necked dragon. It was also interesting to notice how the rotation of the seashell produced not only changes in the forms that I could read, but also in the texture and spreading of the light and shadows on the shell surface as well the dark and middle tones of the light. So at the rotation angle represented in the left drawing, the owl, the shadows acquire a colder tone, the same shadows become more textured in the middle views, the elephant, and warmer in the final view, the dragon. It was interesting how the light and shadow covered circa half of the shell, recalling the Ying and Yang symbol. The warm pinkish colour of the inside of the shell makes a nice contrast with the colder tones (grey-blue) in the fraction lines. Moreover, these warmer tones instantly communicates a certain livelihood, again reminding us that the shell was part of and belonged to a living creature. Shells are both homes and skeletons of sea creatures, so in a way it is even more to be expected that they might convey living forms converging towards the anthropomorphic. Seashells were traces of life that was.
Through my paintings I am committed to reconnect seashells to their lost livelihood and explore what more there could be in their raging, primitive beauty. Thanks for stopping by, in my next post I will make a tutorial on my technique Hugs Bertie :) |
AuthorFreelance illustrator and painter. Archives
May 2023
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