5. Critically analyse and interpret visual situations in order to represent them effectively.

Words of importance:  

"The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps."

T.S. Eliot

PERSONAL ANALYSIS

Written Critique on Artwork Based on Prose

This artwork, inspired by the whole of the T.S. Eliot poem Preludes, aims to highlight key visual scenes and present them as a combination symbolizing how imagination works through the eyes of a young girl. It is not specified who the girl is but it is rather striving to present a situation many can relate to - staying up late at night just not being able to stop turning the pages of a great book. Though the child not being me in particular it present this general idea of the way reading can teleport anyone anywhere. This was inspired by the emotional response to the poem when I remembered a memory of my childhood and how important reading was to me. I somehow wanted to combine all the visual elements of the poem but in a less traditional way than simply representing the scene literally. Investigating how the mind works was the perfect artistic challenge for me.

The image above illustrates the symbolism behind the piece. The notes in white highlight personal elements of importance - the clock for example – is a distorted personal photograph of the town hall watch tower in Sheffield, where I spent my first 3 years of living away from home. That watch tower was the first thing that appeared in my mind when I thought about a clock. The notes in red are particular elements from the poem, represented visually in response to specific quoted verses. ‘The lighting of the lamps’ for instance, is shown on the very top of the piece. The highlighted key description words are used I separately in order to represent the scene in a similar manner as the poem itself. The colourful cloud is the chaos of imagination; the smoke shown in a zig-zag trail across the canvas, investigates the thinking process leading to a resolved idea – represented by the lamp. Reality is framed like a panel of a comic book, while the cloud of ideas is flowing outside of it, impossible to contain.

The artwork is digitally painted in Photoshop in a realistic style, with some elements of photography and texturing. The textures and custom made brushes used were mainly created from the experimentation work for this module: like the leaky texture on the right of the painting is combined from the coffee paintings preparing me for the composition of this piece, and the brush strokes around the lamp-post is the base of one of the drawings for the experimental environment brief. I used a series of images for inspiration referenced below. The composition as a whole is strongly influenced by the posters for the film Hugo, because I wanted to recreate that sense if magic and awe clashed with realism.

This painting was quite an artistic challenge to make. I had not painted a child before, which lead to struggles with understanding its proportions and anatomy. I also had not previously represented a scene so unreal -I learned a lot about mixing colour and balancing out the irregular composition of isolated scenes. It was also very challenging to represent scenes in unusual colours and blend them together – the orange smoke connecting the blue-ish chimney to the brown ground of the Victorian scenery for example. It was difficult to make the imagination elements equally important in the cloud but also make sure that the focus of the whole painting is still the face of the little girl.