Black and White

It is difficult to avoid overwhelming a picture with images, particularly as it is to be overworked later.  I thought I had avoided the problem with the picture below and liked it more or less as it was.  I suspect with the addition of gestural marks it has become rather busy. Although now that I can view them together on the page, perhaps not.

This work was influenced by Daniel Pitin, who uses architectural space as a background for his narrative.  I have tried to use my collage in a similar way.  My intention was to create a scene using architecture but that involved people in a dynamic way. The person jumping is unseen and ignored by everyone around.  The fate of one person is immaterial in the business world, the church crumbling in the background echoes the sentiment of lost concern. Time, on the other hand, is of the essence.  It was interesting to build the structure of the picture using various pieces of architectural pictures and creating a space that might almost be real but can't be.  This element of collage I find very interesting.  I also enjoy working in black and white as colour can often distract. I did wonder about the different shades of grey, I could have re-printed them to make them homogenous but decided in the end I quite liked the variation.

My second Black and White image was again using architecture but this time in a slightly more sinister way.  I wanted to hint at the chaos, fear and terror of the first World War as it is the centenary of the breakout of that campaign.  My intention was again to use architecture in a dark and threatening way.  I wanted to introduce fear and this came to me in the form of an image I had produced for the Nurburgring.  I had enhanced it and it ended up looking vaguely like a spider or piece of tumbleweed.  I thought it would introduce something into my picture that would represent, terror and insidious fear.

I was nervous about overpainting the image which seemed to work fairly well but for it to be more sinister I felt I had to introduce more black, I think the whole thing works quite well now with the addition of gestural marks and the addition of black paint in a couple of areas. I decided to leave Nurburgring as it is fairly close to Nurenburg which is where trials were held in the second world war, so that the image transforms into a more general image of war and the fear of it. 

The following was a picture of Al Hambra and I used the theatrical space to create a narrative about seeing into the past. I used oil pastel acrylic and Indian ink.