Meassuring Margate Pier (JMW Tuner)
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Measuring Margate was created specifically in response to my solo exhibition at the Pie Factory in Margate, an event which coincided with the opening of the new Turner Gallery. Turner‘s iconic picture of Boats at Margate Pier is explored largely through colour.
Taking from Turner his emphasis on colour theory and the centre of the image, I started with primaries mixed to create colour wheel, moving outwards with ‘happy’ and ‘sad ‘colours in an exploding chart of the image.
Tilting Up
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How can a mountain be made to look big? By drawing it large in relation to the scale of the foreground – avoiding the rules of scientific perspective. By tilting up the back planes, stand vertically instead of falling back on a diagonal plane. The interlocking and intersecting of planes where one volume passes into another creates contours of blending.
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Beans
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Did the city give us magic beans to create the finantial crises?
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Stretching Las Meninas
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Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour, by Diego Velázquez (1656)
The work's complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting. I analyzed this painting by constructing a Velazquez compass – one in which you can ‘see through’ the painting. Drawing from Nieto’s viewpoint in the open door, I stretched the drawing to reveal the triangle of the composition and to expose the blank canvas.
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The Old Woman in the Shoe
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There was an old woman, who lived in a shoe;
She had ‘so many’ children, she didn’t know what to do.
What size was her shoe?
There are many choices of origin to this eighteenth century story. The first relates to Queen Caroline wife of King George II who had eight children, while another version refers to King George who began the men’s fashion for wearing white powdered wigs in parliament. According to Aunt Mavor’s little library, the history of this story is that the shoe really belonged to a giant who captured the old woman’s husband.
The eighteenth century is often referred to as the century of illegitimacy – a time of ‘so many’ children. Words became measures in oral traditions by using abstract forms such as ‘bunch, heap or many’. My question is how do you measure ‘so many’? The ancients associated these number words with concrete objects, but unfortunately the names of the original concrete objects have undergone a complete metamorphosis with no recorded data available. I argue the concrete object associated with ‘so many’ was a shoe.
This is the first piece in a series of analysis of measuring ‘old women and their shoes’. This piece measure’s the pharaoh princess as she finds Moses, possibly the first foster child or orphan, in the bulrushes. It is measured in linear measures from the old testaments (Ezekiel)
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Measuring the Workshop
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From the end of the 13th century or earlier, artists carried out their trade within the framework of a workshop. In the workshop, the first tasks the apprentice was taught to perform were practical ones. Brushes and paints were made in the workshop and supports were prepared there. Early experiments with space and volume began in the workshop, but the real turning point in the culture of the workshop took place at the end of the 14th century. Artist in Italy started to study the rules governing space or more specifically how space is perceived by a positioned viewer at a fixed point – the rules of perspective.
Measuring the Workshop measures the workshop – the space and rules of perspective.
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Separating Cezanne's Planes
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Cezanne has been named the father of modern art or the bridge to modern painting through his use of overlapping planes of colour to predict depth perception. He reversed the Renaissance perspective of a single viewer by fragmenting the locations into multiple planes and increased the size of the planes from small to large.
The work analyses Cezanne’s overlapping planes by a measure of separation. Entering and drawing from the left side of the painting, planes are separated to make a distinction between and to see around the space.
The analysis results in an exploding chart that measures separation. Flat colour was used to emphasize the illusion of stepped up planes - yellow as transition, greens and purples to recede and red as salient. The colour is transparent as the plane is implied rather than stated. The colour perspective points behind and around to separate each plane in space from the others.
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Joining Crivellii
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This work joins two of Carlo Crivelli’s paintings The Annunciation (1486) and Madonna of the Swallow (1490)) by a common architectural element – the wall with trees. Joining Crivelli analyzes possibly the first interactive perspective space of a video game, where you enter into one space and exit through another time and space in a different painting.
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Unstacking Caravaggio Analysis
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Caravaggio used light to portray exact moments in time and dark backgrounds to limit the depth of the space behind the picture plane. Space and a sense of depth are achieved through the layers of bodies set behind and above each other. He stacked human parts on top of one another until he filled the screen with flesh. As the figures were stacked, parts of the figures penetrate the picture plane. He allows his world to enter ours.
Using these visual codes to explore and investigate, this work ‘unstacks’ Caravaggio’s picture plane by exploding through a diagonal view. He was a master at right angle foreshortening, which is why I chose to enter the painting through the left right angle of the picture plane.
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Caravaggio used light to portray exact moments in time and dark backgrounds to limit the depth of the space behind the picture plane. Space and a sense of depth are achieved through the layers of bodies set behind and above each other. He stacked human parts on top of one another until he filled the screen with flesh. As the figures were stacked, parts of the figures penetrate the picture plane. He allows his world to enter ours.
Using these visual codes to explore and investigate, this work ‘unstacks’ Caravaggio’s picture plane by exploding through a diagonal view. He was a master at right angle foreshortening, which is why I chose to enter the painting through the left right angle of the picture plane.
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St. Jerome Analysis
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How much information is in one line? This work questions the illusion of perspective. The lines of perspective distort proportions and spatial untiy, but establish a central vanishing point which includes the viewer. The proportions of St. Jerome's body are impractical. Knee to hip measures calculate that one leg is approximately 8 ft, while the other leg is under 4ft. To investigate the information in the perspective lines, I entered the picture from behind St. Jerome, standing on the bridge beside the lion. The result is an analysis - a one off drawing with screen print which is colour coded to the painting.
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