VARIETY OF PERSPECTIVES AND VIEWPOINTS

Picasso/Braque,  Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis

Daniel Pitin, Ben Yates, Gilbert and George, Anthony Green, Robert Rauschenberg

Anselm Kiefer

Matisse developed his style to include his unique cut-outs but not necessarily to produce a multi-perspective.  He was interested in dance and one of the ways that he was able to define different spatial limits was in his Dance of 1931-33 which is produced in three portions on shaped canvases.  Simplicity of style was what he was endeavouring to find through new definitions of form.

Picasso’s development of cubism with Braque was a way of producing an object or person in three dimensions from different perspectives but to produce an image with little in the way of actual perspective, so that the image became a sort of cut out (similar to Matisse’s cut-outs) offering a different view of the same object. However, in works such as Night Fishing at Antibes 1939, Picasso produced multi images in a large painting which is very reminiscent in style to his Guernica painted two years earlier.

Bonnard had a different way of pursuing the idea of the unusual perspective which he did using panels for screens, which took his work away from the easel.  As a consequence his style became more decorative (Nannies’ Promenade, Frieze of Carriages, 1895/6.  In his Twilight, or Croquet Game of 1892, by producing “flat” images they become separated and slightly abstracted as if forming different motifs or pictures in the same painting. Maurice Denis develops this style even further.

Anthony Green’s shaped canvases with their multi aspects could be said to be reminiscent of Matisse’s cut-outs, except that Green has synthesized them into one image. Had Picasso’s separate objects in Night Fishing at Antibes been cut out and stuck to the support his work might have ended up looking similar. Green’s work is almost cubist at times but “opened out” cubism.

Gilbert and George use the multi-image approach to their work, but it is used more as a montage. Balls: The Evening Before the Morning After.  In Dead Boards No: 5, multi perspective images are interspersed with plain wood.

Robert Rauschenberg uses photography in his paintings to restructure the pictorial imagery in his “combines”, doing much the same thing as earlier collage, it incorporated a different discipline firmly into the art world. He also introduces objects into his work, such as the Goat inside the tyre.  Bonnard  effectively  incorporated small paintings within a painting which is similar to  Rauschenberg’s work which provides conflicting viewpoints in one painting.

Daniel Pitin de-constructs a scene by representing buildings and parts of buildings in seemingly impossible but readable scenes.  By painting in this way he effectively opens up the interior space not only in the painting but psychologically as well.  His paintings often depict war ravaged landscapes, exploring the darker side of the aftermath of conflict.

In terms of sculpture, contemporary work seems generally to display the temporary rather than the multi image.  Splashes of glass or material of all kinds, although Anselm Kiefer’s Books display various view points, but that is what sculpture is about, viewing something from different angles and in that sense it does draw upon the early cubist work I suppose. Because film can now utilize digital technology the created image can be incorporated into different aspects of a live frame by frame movie. Therefore the options for multi-layering and multi-imaging are limitless.

Digital photography enables artists to juxtapose images in three dimensional ways as seen in the work of Ben Yates’ photo cubism.  The view of reality can become split so that there is a discontinuity in the visual image leading to insubstantial views which can be provocative and disconcerting. 

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.  



COLLAGE ARTISTS

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, MIMMO ROTELLA, ROMARE BEARDEN

RAYMOND HAINS, TIM SHEPARD, DANIEL PITIN, DAVID MACH

Rauschenberg’s collages are extremely varied in their look and incorporate silk screen printing at a lower level of the painting with collage and sometimes paint on top.  His compositions therefore are interesting therefore not only because of their variety of style but method also. His subject matter is more political and global.

By contrast Rotella is mainly fixated on Marilyn Monroe in particular and the film world in general so his works become rather monotonous.  He uses torn strips and displays the look of old posters. He doesn’t appear to use paint, if he does, it is minimal. As far as Rotella's Marilyn Monroe pictures are concerned a similarity can be drawn between his collages and Andy Warhol's screen printing, the medium is different but the image as an icon is the same.

Another artist who uses a similar old poster look but in my view more cleverly than Rotella, is Raymond Hains.  His collage is often torn right back to almost nothing and he uses very little additional paint.  The way he tears his strips is often very different, sometimes thin, sometimes blocks, but the finished works are visually appealing.

Romare Bearden features Jazz and the black community in his collages they are represented in a much more realistic/narrative way than the previous artists.  He is literally picture making with collage. The colours  he uses for the musical scenes are bright and suggestive of jazz. He probably uses paint as a background but doesn’t seem to use paint on the top surface over the collage, unless it is used very subtlety.

Tim Shepard’s work has great appeal for me, I like his densely packed collages as well as his landscape work, Spitalfields for example. I also think he is right that memory is collage. We only retain fragments of memories and, for me at least, my memory doesn’t run like a cine camera. It is a collection of fragments stitched together in my memory to almost give the appearance of film frames and that is what Tim Shepard’s work is like it includes misplaced or incomplete scraps of memory, so in that sense his work is more realistic than Realism with a capital ‘R’.

Daniel Pitin is a collage artist who incorporates figurative art into his work and he creates haunting images, which, because of his background can seem dark and occasionally threatening.  Like Shepard his work has narrative and has the look of a real space until you look more closely and you realize the impossibility of some of the architecture. 

I feel the difference, if there is one, between today’s collage artists and earlier work is the element of semi realism, particularly using architecture.  David Mach, is another who uses this method.  The use of computers has also appeared more in contemporary work, if not to create the image then to help with the layout.