Unit 2: Research and Critical Reflection
Initial exploration:
Moving into unit 2, I will continue to combine both intimate bodily references with the botanical, obscure and otherworldly. Having created sculptural forms influenced by ‘Eccentric Abstraction’, I will more thoroughly explore the use of materiality to evoke meaning as my work develops. When making work, it is interesting to consider ‘Eccentric Abstraction' as a tool to perceive, understand and physicalise things beyond the reach of our senses/visibility (Lippard, 1971.p.145). Similar to how the technology of a microscope allows humans to see things we could not previously been sure existed.
Artists af Klint and Lozano emphasise this artistic approach; their artwork manifesting spirituality and energy. In terms of abstraction, af Klint uses the language of painting (shape, colour, gesture) to give the spiritual dimension a concrete form. Lee Lozano’s paintings try to make energy manifest. In these works, abstraction is not about expression but about forms of representation beyond the visible.
Break down of thoughts in mind map form: eccentric abstraction as a tool to manifest things beyond the visible- sensuality and meaning through materiality
Hilma af Klint, 'The Ten Largest', 1907- manifest spirituality
Lee Lozano. Ream, Blanton Museum of Art, 1963- manifest energy
Rauschenberg's 'White Paintings', 1951
Rauschenberg’s ‘White Paintings’ (1951) tie in with this idea of representing something beyond our senses; beyond the physicalised and realised. Existing in four different white house paint on canvas arrangements, Rauschenberg intentionally left free any mark of the artists hand to exhibit the modernist, seemingly blank canvas. This allowed for the continual evolvement and refabrication of his paintings. Their white backdrop is activated as viewers pass by, casting shadows and reflecting the light and sounds of the occupied space onto the painted works. Here, Rauschenberg allows the subject matter to shift, accentuating an interest in the role of chance/ aleatory to the process of painting. He questions the artists role in determining the meaning /intentions of a painting. This mirrors my evolved, newfound outlook to my artistic practice whereby the paint and/or material takes precedence over the need to represent a physicalised, fully realised ‘thing’.
Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951, house paint on canvas, 72 x 72 in, four panels
Aleatoric Art: Chance and Unpredictability
Throughout this unit I will continue to focus on ‘aleatoric’ artistic processes, leaving part of my painted composition up to chance. I will achieve this spontaneity by focusing on what were once ‘unconventional’ painting techniques adopted by action and colour field painters such as soak-staining, gestural mark making, and dripping. This liberated approach allows the visceral and free-flowing, unrestrained, organic and amorphous quality of my paintings to take centre stage; accentuating musicality and fluidity. Painting with this ‘stream of consciousness’(Jaray,2012,p.52), I aim to create paintings which one cannot pinpoint, pin down or surmise, as they take on an ever-evolving perspective distinct and personal to each individual viewer.
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Helen Frankenthaler Cedar Hill, 1983
Lisa Kellner and Expanded Painting: Silk Sculptures
With the eccentric idiom in mind, Lisa Kellner’s silk sculptures explore similar notions of sensuality and femininity, intertwining bulbous, bodily, gendered forms with organic, anthropomorphic landscapes. Considering sculptural painting and its ability to transcend the boundary of the canvas, I will continue to explore how different textural materials evoke meaning, sensuous experience and bodily concepts.
As demonstrated with my previous Unit 1 sculptural paintings ‘Vessels’ and ‘Auricularia Auricula-Judae’, the silky translucency of organza and chiffon are reminiscent of epidermal layers (both bodily and botanical) (Lippard, 1971, p.146)whilst also relating to the synthetic and artificial. The result is an otherworldly bodily landscape both familiar and intimate to the viewer through touch and form, yet foreign through its otherworldly appearance, its translucence and iridescence.
Lisa Kellner, 'Merging organic and constructed systems', structured silk, (2009)
Lisa Kellner, 'Slab' – silk, pigment, thread, monofilament 58” x 36” x 43”, (2009)
Painting, Structural and Sculptural:
Engaging with the boundaries between the two disciplines
Emily Wenman, 'Epidermis', oil on canvas, 100x100cm (March 2021)
Richard Diebenkorn, 'Ocean Park No.27', oil o canvas, 203x254cm, (1970)
As I continue to develop the language between painting and sculpture in my practice, I have become more aware of the ‘nature and physicality of space’ intentionally made within a painting. The above composition ‘Epidermis, 2021’ engages directly with the positioning and spatial relationship between each ‘trichome cell’ within the epidermal layer; it is both structural and sculptural. Similarly, American twentieth century artist Diebenkorn's 'Ocean Park No.27' considers attitudes to painting as a forum for the exploration of the purity of colour, shape and space (Farthing, 2006,p.838). Diebenkorn's white borders serve to reinforce the formal geometry of the composition, creating a painting that has dynamic and sculptural elements.
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In 'Epidermis', I have also intentionally left parts of primed white canvas bare, with white outlines and 'stencilled trichome motifs' occupying the space. Influenced by abstract expressionist soak-staining, dripping and paint washes, the thin application of paint allows for the geometric design of these paintings to be counterbalanced by an atmospheric quality.
Such atmospherics creates continuities with figurative work, eluding to light, sea air and aquatic impressions more typical of Turner or Whistler (Farthing, 2006,p.838). This in turn gives reason for these paintings to remain as paintings rather than being elevated into three dimensional space as solely geometric sculptural forms.
Art, nature and human experience
Considering this representation of the organic and botanical through the use of synthetic material and sculptural painting, I wish to better translate the relationship between the natural and artificial in my art practice.
Joseph Beuys, '7000 Oaks, Tree-planting Ceremony, (1996)
As demonstrated during ‘The Greenhouse Effect’ 2001 Exhibition, the harmonious co-existence with nature under the sign of ‘art’ is forever questioned and contradicted. On one hand, environmental artist Beuys suggests that the ‘aesthetic and everyday’ can merge, subsequently effecting social change. His tree-planting ceremony ‘7000 Oaks 1982’ connects art to the environment as he called for the planting of seven thousand trees at Dia Centre for the Arts, NY (Dion,1961,p.32). Beuys’s artistic performance and direct contact with nature suggests a profound and symbiotic connection between the human condition and all living creations.
Damien Hirst, 'In and Out of Love', (1991)
Contrastingly, Damien Hirst implies that healing the rupture between art and the natural world is ‘fundamentally irreconcilable’. Hirst states that to be reconciled would undermine the very nature of art itself as ‘connected to the world of artifice’. Hirsts installation with live butterflies ‘In and Out of Love, 1991’, conveys that nature and art are packaged experiences which require ‘essential alienation in the viewer’. Here, both art and nature are seen as entirely different realms of social experience and cannot be unified. Unlike Beuys, Hirst’s installation accepts and addresses the ‘impossibility of our desire for harmony’(Dion,1961,p.32). This concept of ‘art connected to artifice’ is interesting when considering bioluminescence, a chemiluminescence that is natural by existence, yet artificial and synthetic by appearance. Here nature is supposedly connected to artifice as bioluminescence is mystifying; appearing entirely different/otherwordly to what it fundamentally is.
Aquatic Bioluminescence
Aquatic Bioluminescence in marine line and botany: Bioluminescent Warty Comb Jellyfish
Researching the natural wonder of bioluminescence, a survival mechanism utilised by marine life/aquatic plants, I will translate the hyperintelligence, sacredness and otherworldliness of nature through paint. This ultraviolet, fluorescent light used to startle and deter predators connotes artificial, man-made concepts such as an urban clubbing scene or an industrial cityscape.
Such iridescence found in the natural world is so otherworldly It is beguiling to human understanding. By evoking this wonderous luminosity in my art, I translate the nature as inherently ethereal and hyperintelligent whilst also highlighting the artificial and synthetic perspective to the organic and unspoilt.
Emily Wenman, experimenting with iridescent, luminous washes of paint and light thin layering/dripping- influenced by colour field/ abstract expressionist techniques (2021)
Emily Wenman, 'Midnight Garden', oil and oil pastel on canvas, 150cmx100cm, (Feb 2021)
Close up of aquatic/submerged flora/botanicals
This practical research on painterly processes has enabled me to better represent a commercialised and urbanised undertone to organic, botanical, and now also aquatic subject matter. Employing Prussian blue washes of oil (often combined with sap green, browns and Indian red) I emphasise this focus on marine life and the transition into the nautical whilst alluding to an ‘anthropomorphic landscape’. Utilising paint pigment in such an immersive and expansive way, similar to Abstract Expressionist methods, I hope to highlight parts of the painting’s visual information as more nebulous or latent. In ‘Midnight Garden’, brushstrokes and linear impressions of micrographic trichomes are layered underneath washes of paint to appear ambiguous, submerged and somewhat unobtainable to the viewer.
Photographing Flora: Anna Halm Schudel
Anna Halm Schudel, 'Blumen', (2013)
Similar to Schudel, I aim to translate notions of ‘nature as divine’, transcendent and mystical. Employing vivid, luminous colour tones, her photographs express flora’s femininity and sexuality; as well as the energised glow of nature before it wilts and fades. By capturing cut flowers underwater, Schudel emphasises nature as delicate, transient and otherworldly whilst giving her images an immersive, aquatic energy.
Photographic and Material Research: Bioluminescence, Synthetic Flora
Emily Wenman, Photographic Research: experimenting with materiality and its translucency, capturing and creating flecks of visual information and botanical impressions through films of light, (22/03/2021)
As with ‘Midnight Garden’ where micrographic botanical impressions exist within immersive washes of paint and amorphous shapes, Schudel's underwater photographs similarly express ‘indistinctive distinctions’ within an amorphous, aquatic and free-flowing picture plane (Schudel, 2009. p22). I emphasise this type of nebulous, immersive composition with flecks of more distinctive visual information through my botanical imagery with chiffon. Like Schudel, I highlight the vibrant yet fleeting life of botany through photography.
With Lisa Kellner, Rauchenberg’s ‘Combines’ (1950s/60s), and Eccentric Abstraction in mind, incorporating translucent fabric into my work has helped me reflect on how materiality evokes and alters a works emotional weight and meaning. By capturing flora in amongst layers of organza/chiffon fabric, flora takes on a more commercial, synthetic and artificial perspective. They take on an ethereal, dreamlike and sacred quality, highlighting this idea of nature as 'The Sublime' and mystical. Following on from ‘Midnight Garden’, I will paint from these ethereal photographs, focusing on translucency, layering and lucidity of paint. I will pay particular attention to the impressions made through the fabric rather than translating the botanical material itself to create more abstract and ambiguous painted imagery.
Emily Wenman, 'Botanical Impressions Diptych', oil on canvas, 40cmx60cm, (April 2021)
Capturing botanical impressions on the folds of translucent organza fabrics allows for representational elements to be made less distinguishable through layered surfaces/states of matter. I am intrigued by the way in which flora combined with different light densities, and films of fabric, creates nebulous and abstract forms. These ambiguous ‘botanical impressions’ allude to the ethereal, mystical and dreamlike (Schudel, 2009. p22). Focusing on a richness of colour, I have tried to paint the aquatic in a luminous and commercial light, similar to the otherworldly appearance of bioluminescent algae and marine life.
Washes of amorphous, streamline shapes that are interconnected engulfs viewers in a free flowing, submerged underwater world. I employ a colour palette of Prussian, Cobalt and Ultramarine blues, portraying a commercialised yet ethereal representation of underwater flora. Both botanical paintings viewed collectively creates an immersive and dynamic experience, whereby ambiguous, abstract forms flow seamlessly from one canvas to the next.
Pictorial Construction: Relief Painting
considering relief/ sculptural painting by experimenting with incorporating different materials such as pressed flowers onto canvas alongside paint (2021)
Photographing and painting floral impressions within fabric in a synthetic and ethereal light has made me think more about pictorial construction. Thinking about how these elements are placed compositionally has led me to press flowers and other plants which I could incorporate or work from in future paintings. Studying herbarium archives and pressing live flora, I consider the aquatic, free-flowing amorphous material of paint in combination with the definitive, representational elements of botanical material itself. This acts as a form of sculptural painting as these pressed flowers could elevate from the canvas as relief painting.
Pictorial Construction: Digital Compositional Collages
Digital Collages of micrographic trichomes and botanical cells within panels of paint washes, compositional research/ preparatory work to help formulate and visualise the pictorial construction of the resolved painted canvas (23/03/2021)
Pressing, ordering and presenting flora in a cohesive manner made me consider the importance of compositional elements such as the silhouette, motif and negative/positive space within an image. This, alongside photographic experimentation has made me think more about the relationship between form, surface, shape and colour that makes up a composition. In order to balance the definitive alongside the indistinctive, more nebulous forms I have been producing digital collages before painting. These compositional collages help me consider how I might go about presenting such imagery within set dimensions. I have therefore collated and combined organic, cellular, aquatic and botanical visuals together to create digital collages to work from. I intend to translate these digital compositions onto canvas.
Processes: Jules Olitski
Iridescent pigment, surface and edge
Jules Olitski, 'Instant Loveland', 2946 × 6457 mm, (1968)
Depicting this commercialised undertone to organic, amorphous and natural forms, I have decided to more extensively explore paint as a medium. In addition to paint application, I experiment with various paint combinations to better achieve this ‘chemiluminescence’, florescence and otherworldly hyperintelligence to the natural and organic. American painter Jules Olitski’s colour field works achieve this transcendental, dreamlike quality to colour that I am interested in. Through the interaction of various layers of hue, Olitski creates an intensity and hyperactivity to his painted surface(Olitski,2011,p.120). The paint appears to hum and vibrate from the canvas as he applies films of delicate, tonally related colours. In his 1966 painting ‘Instant Loveland’, Olitski emphasises the spiky texture of the canvas surface by using varying densities of pigment. He explores the framing-edge through his radically innovative technique of laying down atmospheric blankets of coloured spray/acrylic marked by straight edge value changes near the edge of the painting(Olitski,2011,p.120).
Placing a greater emphasis on colour and exploring the framing-edge of a canvas, Jules Olitski's work is both imposing and dream-like. 'Instant Loveland', 1968.
Emily Wenman, 'Electric Lines', 122cmx127cm, oil on canvas (2021)
Iridescent paint combinations: magenta, ultramarine and titanium to create violet
This meticulous and artful interaction of colour within the painting and at its edges has made me think more about how I apply or choose not to apply/remove paint to a canvas’ surface or edge. I will experiment with watered down foundation layers of acrylic and paint pigments (instead of solely oils) to achieve this dreamlike fluorescence on canvas. This has determined an evolved colour palette whereby I utilise more luminous colours, such as viridian and emerald greens, conveying the bioluminescent and synthetic nature to aquatic plants/organisms. As with ‘Instant Loveland’, I emphasise the mystique and ethereal quality of my work through violet shades; made by mixing titanium white, ultramarine and magenta oils. I utilise this iridescent violet in both oil paintings of aquatic material 'Electric Lines' and 'Tendrils' 2021. This luminous and iridescent aesthetic highlights the beguiling hyper-intelligence of nature and the underwater world that at times seems alien and foreign to human understanding.
Emily Wenman, 'Electric Lines', 122cmx127cm, oil on canvas (2021)
Emily Wenman, 'Tendrils', oil on canvas, 100cmx100cm, (26/04/2021)
'Naturally Brilliant Colour', Kew Gardens, Summer 2021
'Naturally Brilliant Colour' Kew, 2021- large-scale kaleidoscope containing glass elements coloured with Pure Structural Colour
Abalone Shells: Natural Iridescent Pearlessence
Kew Garden’s ‘Naturally Brilliant Colour’ Summer 2021 Exhibition showcases a new type of technology, ‘Pure Structural Colour’, which replicates nature’s brightest, most vivid hues. Similar to the wonderous and beguiling nature of Bioluminescence, an entirely natural phenomenon that appears otherworldly, ‘Structural Colour’ considers similar concepts of nature as ‘sublime’ divine and sacred. In nature, the microscopic colourless structures within the surface layers of flora and fauna reflect light to generate a kaleidoscope of luminescent, vivid yet entirely natural colour. Inspired by blue-green tinges of luminous plants and wings of tropical butterflies/hummingbirds, flakes of ‘Pure Structural Colour’ can now be mixed into paint and used by artists such as exhibited botanical painter ‘Coral G Guest’.
Coral G Guest, 'painting with flecks of Pure Structural Colour', (2021)
Julia Trickey, Exhibited contemporary botanical artist, (2021)
This exhibition has exposed me further to the phenomenon of natural luminosity and its synthetic, artificial and bewitching appearance which artists often attempt to replicate. ‘Naturally Brilliant Colour’ 2021, exhibits and explores various artistic techniques used to depict the brightest, most vivid hues found in nature. I intend to use fluorescent acrylic and/or black backgrounds to intensify colours and experiment with layered glazes to portray rich, lustrous, floral shades, replicating this natural iridescence(Parker, 2021, p58).
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Considering this combination of the natural and artificial, ‘Structural Colour’ not only reproduces this beautiful natural phenomenon using transparent materials for art’s benefit (Parker, 2021, p58), but also could potentially replace unethically sourced, unsustainable pigments used in wider industries; tying together botanical and environmental art.
Isabella Plantation: Capturing Floral Iridescence
Emily Wenman, 'Botanical Photographic Series: Isabella Plantation', capturing floral iridescence and sensuality, (16/05/2021)
Having visited ‘Isabella Plantation’, a woodland garden in Richmond park, I have taken a series of photographs focusing on the cyclical, soft and amorphous form of flora and botany, its sensuality and botanical iridescence. With the vivid and softly structured works of Schudel and O’Keeffe in mind, I have captured nature up-close and on an intimate scale, the depths of a flower’s receptacles taking centre stage. This large scale, luminous photographic composition portrays the sensuality, lust and vitality so innate to nature(Parker, 2021, p58). Additionally, as with Structural Colour, Quinn’s installation ‘Garden 2000’ and Hirsts installation ‘In and Out of Love 1991’, I reflect on the blurred boundaries, interconnectedness and differentiation between the natural world and the artificial and synthetic by painting and producing iridescent colours artificially.
Emily Wenman, 'Rhododendron Superbum', oil and acrylic on canvas, 100cmx80cm, (19/05/2021)
Since photographing flora at Richmond Park’s ‘Isabella Plantation’, I have decided to create more small scale, quick responses in mass as opposed to labouring over one larger canvas. This process has been liberating as I feel my brushstrokes are freer, more gestural and overall, less ridged. Being exposed to Olitski and Mckeever’s impressionistic techniques and the natural phenomenon of ‘Pure Structural Colour’, I have more extensively researched into different processes and materials used to achieve this ‘chemiluminescence’ so innate to the natural world. Creating a series of thinly applied fluorescent acrylic grounds, has allowed my painting to pick up momentum, it's outcome more dynamic and instinctive. Leaving part of the canvas edge bare and painting thin acrylic grounds, the uneven foundations leave slight impressions which I am able to utilise and turn into visual information. I would like to continue with these loose gestural strokes, painting on multiple acrylic grounds at once. This faster, more energetic way of working allows the works take on a more visceral, intuitive persona.
working on multiple thinly applied fluorescent acrylic grounds at once: a more energised painting process