Synchronicity I 2014 S

Still from Synchronicity I 2014 S. Video, 8 minutes.

This film work explores additive colour. As a painter I use subtractive colour, that is colour that exists in a tangible form (pigment) and relates to our experience of the natural world in that colour defines a surface. There are only two additive colours in the natural world; the sky and the colour we see when our eyes are closed. All other colours are essentially subtractive and exist to define a surface. In the non natural world additive colour exists in projected light and screen.

In this work, I chose the black frame to focus on the image that is actually a non-image and creates an effect of simultaneous contrast – the colours that the eye is constantly searching for or creating in opposition to the actual colour. The simultaneous contrast is further explored by the bar and the horizons within the non image. The fusion points of one colour against another are, of course, pictorial and relate to my painting, but here the time based form creates multiple contrasts that further explore a changing interaction.

I am interested that we look at an image that is not an image and perhaps this is where the collaboration with sound is really possible. The chromatic event is autonomous and certainly to do with reality in so much that it takes place in time and space. In using this tool for making a film work I have begun to explore the uncertain elements of mixing additive colour; it is not to do with aesthetics or expression, but instead focuses on the unstable range of colour perception in the additive environment.

Stokes, Adrian: The Image in Form.  Penguin 1972

Cruz Diez, Carlos: Reflection on Color. Fundación Juan March, 2009

Albers, Josef: Interaction of Colour. Yale 2006

Synchronicity I 2014 S. Video, 8 minutes:

https://vimeo.com/104238961

LLAWN02 – The Presence Of Absence – post three

I plan to make an acrylic painting about my object and reference the place it was made as well as imagining the ellipse (shape) and colour; the imagined colour of pewter. I will also use colours observed from around Cranbourn Street – the red tiles of the Station; shop fronts etc. Also, the slope of the street, grey tiles, pedestrianised but on an interesting camber, mirroring the climb north on Charing Cross Road. Cranbourn is a wide street sloping elegantly into the green square. When walking back from Cranbourn street I called into Making Colour at the National Gallery. There a still life by Jan Jansz Treck, Still Life with a Pewter Flagon and Two Ming Bowls gave me the colour indication I was looking for when thinking about the colour of pewter: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-jansz.-treck-still-life-with-a-pewter-flagon-and-two-ming-bowls.
Quite a blue-grey, perhaps with lead content. The kind of gun metal blue mixed with Cobalt and Burnt Sienna. But, perhaps the Bray plate is more silvery, typical of tableware. Incidentally, the painting is included into the exhibition as the colour of blue in the Ming bowls had faded to a green, the artist using a fugitive blue.

LLAWN02 – The Presence Of Absence – post two

Pewter plate made by Charles Bray, Pewterer, Cranbourne St, Leicester square, London. Prob 19thc, 220 mm in diameter

Charles Bray, Pewterer, is well known. His registered address was 14 Cranbourne Street. Whilst in London, I went down to that part of Leicester Square to see if No.14 is still there. Cranbourn St straddles Charing Cross Road, contains many theatre ticket shops and fast food outlets. Looking at Tallis’s map (1838 – 43), No 14 is now under the Hippodrome building (built 1900) on the North East side.

There are however plenty of older buildings opposite and Cranbourn Alley running through to Bear Street. Today, Leicester Square is a busy centre and would have been in Bray’s time (for example, Bear Alley, the centre of the hat trade in the mid 1800s). The Pewter plate is not large and perhaps would have been part of a set, for everyday use. I wonder if it is well worn. I notice the ‘e’ has dropped from Cranbourn Street (3) in the description given. I wonder when this happened – or was the ‘e’ a mistake? On Tallis’s map Cranbourn is without the ‘e’. (4) Interestingly a newsagent has Cranbourne with an ‘e’ (5). Perhaps I will put the E back in the painting.

LLAWN02 – The Presence Of Absence – post one

Pewter plate made by Charles Bray, Pewterer, Cranbourne St, Leicester square, London. Prob 19thc, 220 mm in diameter. I do not know the object and have not seen it. I have to imagine it and create an image about it. Imagination is fundamental to creativity so this task is, in one important aspect, essential to the making of a painting. The actual and its illusion are not always directly linked; the reality here in pictorial terms must develop only from the imagination.