Significant hurdles have been presented to my practise throughout the first term; if anything, these challenges have grown more intense as my work has instantaneously progressed and I have become more informed of the discourses that circulate my practice. I have had to adopt a more quick-witted working style since being conscious of the short-term, becoming acclimated to life at Camberwell, and my obsession with employing the methodical and time-consuming approach of oil painting. Shortly before beginning the course, I experimented with the merging of photography and paint using an array of acrylic paint, polka pens, and ink as quick studies, with interesting and unexpected results: the glossy, flat surface of the photograph becomes malleable with paint, almost sculptural as the matte paint creates a new layer of interpretation. Ironically, I often find myself taking in more stimuli from the work of photography than from painting. When considering this duplexity between painting and photography, for me the two have become synonymous with artifice and illusion, and the boundary between these two distinct disciplines has become porous—especially when amidst the surrounding ecology of media images and its continuous evolving landscape.

Richter intensifies the photographic quality by simulating the blurring or fuzziness caused by poor print and reproduction quality. Richter himself stated that he was "not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.” (Richter, 1995, pg. 73) In describing Richter’s work in his book ‘Gerhard Richtert: Fourty Years of Painting,’ Robert Storr affluently supposes that Richter’s use of painting had injected "feeling into images that had seemingly been emptied of it by overexposure." (Storr, 2002, pg. 39) Many of the images I entertain, have been digested from a plethora of magazine and digital reproductions with a spectrum of deficiencies. I have enhanced the immediacy of the photographic qualities in painting through juxtaposing compositions and collage. As a result, the object can no longer be reliably located in reference to the picture plane, and instead of receiving the steady image typical of the commonly employed oil painting techniques, we must work to correct our perceptions of the painting. Then perhaps, within the rigid and artificial standards of digital media, the real suddenly but momentarily emerges.

The emphasis on the use of appropriated pictures and media by the Pictures Generation artists serves as inspiration for how I use found imagery. Crimp claims that these artists have turned “to the available images in the culture around them. But they subvert the standard signifying function of those pictures, tied to their captions, their commentaries, their narrative sequences tied, that is, to the illusion that they are directly transparent to a signified." (Crimp, 1977, pg. 5) Simply speaking, it can be said that in an image-saturated world these artists were responding to pictures to remark on the function of media in society and how they impact our perceptions and experiences. Crimp quotes Walter Benjamin's The Short History of Photography (1931) in his article titled Pictures, writing, "The caption will become the most significant component of the photograph." (Crimp, 1977, pg. 5) In researching the group's intricacies, I see the ways in which imagery appears omnipresent, uncanny, or bleak until the title provides enhanced meaning and context. By isolating and modifying images, artists draw our focus to their underlying meanings and decide not on the basis of our immediate encounter with the subject but on the basis of our connections with other images that are conceptually similar to the one in question. In a similar vein, I try to challenge the conventional interpretation of my own works by negating the cultural and linguistic weight of titles, texts, and language in an effort to pervert our normal visual perceptions. For instance, my painting entitled Going to See a Man About a Dog has a double entendre: the depiction portrays a man and a dog, but the title is also used as an idiom, predominantly of British origin, generally used to conceal one’s true destination.

My practise is heavily influenced by the history of painting; hence, my work recognises the intrinsic responsibility of image-making. My focus is to challenge conventional visual perception by exploring alternative approaches to making images. The tactile approach to image-making draws the viewer in and plays with the relationship between two and three dimensions, with the sculptural element rendering it a more speculative and conceptual object to divulge the meaning of a picture. The language shifts when the viewer's perception is altered by the tactile presence of the work, semantically pointing to the material attributes of pictures as objects. Frame, acrylic, aluminium, paint, and everyday objects are instruments I hope to explore further that could embody and contribute to the artificial and physical properties of images.

To supersede or advance my current research inquiry into images, I also hope to expand my inquiry into the objecthood of painting through the equivocal art discourses of reflexivity and agency. I am first going to revisit artistic movements such as the Arte Povera Italian art movement, which sought to question the traditional notion of the autonomous, self-contained artist and instead emphasised using space actively, with the audience as the catalyst. Arte Povera's considerable rate of reflexivity and consciousness of historical precedent may be understood within this framework of investigating the relationship between the subjective and objective that allows irony and language to play a larger role. I would also like to give more attention to artists like Simeon Barclay and Sonia Boyce, who encourage a participatory approach that questions creative authorship and cultural differences through their collaborative and inclusive practices.

References:

Storr, R. and Richter, G., 2002. Gerhard richter: forty years of painting. The Museum of Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd.

Obrist, H.U. and Richter, G., 1995. Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting: Writing and Interviews 1962-1993. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd.

Committee for the Visual Arts, Incorporated, 1977. Pictures: an exhibition of the work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Philip Smith: Artists Space. [press release] September 24 - October 29, 1977. Available at: https://texts.artistsspace.org/6wdhi1kq [Accessed 22 January 2023].

Lumley, R., 2004. Arte povera: Movements in Modern Art. London: Tate Publishing.