Olivia J A Level Transformations Project 2020
Statement of Intent - Transformations My initial ideas for the transformation project were focused around the idea of development of style and technique, distortion of the face and the ways in which an artwork can be displayed. After visiting the Tate and Whitechapel Galleries, I was inspired by Picasso, Dana Schutz and Daniel Richter as they all encorporated an abstract style to potray the figures in their paintings. I also visited the Musée Picasso d’Antibes which led me to study Picasso’s paintings in which he further distorts the figures. Jeff Huntingdon and Daisei Terazono have also hugely influenced my ideas for the project. Early on I realised I wanted to produce a diptych which moved through two difference styles to show the transformation of style across the canvases. Since I was interested in distortion from studying Picasso, I began to look at contemporary artist Jeff Huntingdon who distorts his portraits by using different angles of the face blended together and boxes around specific areas of the face. I produced a test piece using photos of my friend Hannah to develop my own painting in the style of Huntingdon which I was pleased with, and I aimed to produce a second portrait in an abstract style to make up the second half of the diptych. I continued to focus on Picasso’s abstract portraits, and painted a second canvas to be the second half of the diptych. However, despite trying different ways of abstracting the subject of my photos, I realised that two portraits of the same photo did not ‘connect’ to my idea of transformation of styles since they didn’t work together. This led me to decide to paint one portrait across two canvases, which would be displayed slightly separately from each other to show the transformation of the style. As I developed this idea I came across Daisei Terazono on Pinterest, who incorporates lots of colours in his portraits, which also feature a distorted subject. I was fascinated by his use of colour so I produced my own version of one of his paintings which I was much happier with than my abstract test paintings I had previously produced.
Whilst working to develop a style based on Terazono’s work, I learned a lot about colour theory and produced my own plan for how I would represent light and dark tones according to complementary, triadic and analogous colours. I would like my concluding piece to reflect my subject, Hannah, who is very creative but also academic. The bright, colourful style of Terazono’s paintings on the first canvas is intended to show her creativity whilst the more realistic, blended style of Huntington on the second canvas is intended to show her ability to think logically and pragmatically which contrasts to her innovativity. In order to convey this idea, my first canvas will feature half of Hannah’s head painted with a bright colour scheme, based around blue, and the second canvas will feature the other half of her head and neck and her sweatshirt, which will be painted realistically according to the colours in the photo. Terazono uses lines in the background of his work and I have chosen to incorporate lines in the background of my diptych as well, to show that Hannah’s ideas cannot be boxed in by the environment around her, which is represented with single lines as well as lines which meet to form a right angle (and therefore are half of a square). I have titled the paintings ‘HAN’ and ‘NAH’ which together form ‘HANNAH’. Since the name ‘Hannah’ is a palindrome, I thought it worked well for the paintings since no matter which way the title is flipped, it remains the same, and this fits with my idea of Hannah remaining true to her creativity and scholarly abilities.