Critical reflection:
In the past, I like to use memos and pen and paper around me to record my thoughts in the form of words anytime and anywhere, so as to avoid those sparkling and fleeting ideas from being thrown out of my mind. Recently, however, I gradually found the thin record of words cannot fully express my thoughts, and I turned to painting to record my emotions and thoughts, and thus created a dialogue with myself and the audience. In my paintings, I orchestrate colour, space, line, and texture to reflect my fluid emotion and identity. I interpret my experience in ways that reflect a drive to understand more completely the perpetually intertwined ideas of identity and beauty.
Inspired and influenced by Hilma af Klint's automatic writing and automatic drawing painting methods, that is to say, the visualization of spiritual power, I have also begun to see painting as a form of self-interpretation, self-writing and self-releasing. In other words, the way of painting in my creation is a kind of improvisation, trying to compose the picture by stacking up the elements layer by layer, painting quickly, and then making it again and again.
Painting is the way and the result of my thinking to face my self-spiritual world and self-perception. Through the accumulation of layers of pigment, the collision of colors, the complexity and entanglement of lines, and the layering of patterns in the picture, I am narrating all the anxiety, uneasiness, depression, and high emotions in my self-spiritual world. I am also using this direct abstract painting language to mirror my inner emotions, seeking a spiritual transmission. As a window for my expression and presentation, I hope to convey a sense of power of life to the audience, bringing them novel feelings and experiences.
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
Why do I choose to work with abstract painting?
In "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", Wassily Kandinsky argues that the artist can perceive that the source of the world is the inner spirit. In his book "Point and Line to Plane", Kandinsky states that "in figurative art, the voice of the artistic element is muffled and weakened; in abstract art, the artistic element is self-expressive and full of its own voice. " Inspired by the lyrical abstract artists Kandinsky and Paul Klee, I want to preserve my encounters, feelings, thoughts, and emotional changes in the real world in the form of paintings. At the same time, I am searching and exploring myself in the process of painting, and I hope that I can break away from the constraints of reality and pursue the release of my inner emotions in my paintings.
I want to preserve my encounters with the real world, my feelings, thoughts and emotional changes that I experience in the real world, through painting. At the same time, I am searching and exploring myself in the process of painting, and I hope that I can break away from the constraints of reality and pursue the release of my inner emotions in my paintings.
In my Unit 1, I found that I had some changes under the influence of my new environment. I came to London, London life for me is a new perception and creative concept input, strong art atmosphere, turbulent social security, polarised living environment, racial and cultural diversity, freedom, tolerance, open learning atmosphere, brought me a diversified shock and impact on the mind, countless galleries, museums, exhibitions have brought me a strong visual experience. Under the influence of the diversity of the new environment, my mental pain and panic, so that I am caught in the contradiction between the increase of self-needs and the reality is difficult to meet. My emotions caused by this confusion are like an endless loop, tense, constrained, astringent, which are constantly repeated in my mind. I found it difficult to describe these thoughts from the fragments of my life in words, so in my creations, I tried to use lines as the main element to record and capture the trajectory of consciousness under these different thoughts, so that the lines drawn in accordance with my emotions slowly became a kind of catharsis and self-interpretation, and the strokes in the picture are the traces that touch my heart, and they are the antennae that connect my thoughts. Compared with my previous tendency to experiment with the composition of images and painting language, I now think more deeply about my relationship with the world around me in different environments, and use my paintings to convey my perceptions and thoughts about the new environment.
Some details of "The New Utopia"
While working on this spiritual painting, I have been exploring how to use line, colour and shape to express my personal spirituality. I was inspired by Henri Matisse's wild use of colour and strong impact in his paintings, which he expressed in "Jazz" in 1908: "As regards the expression of colour, a purely intuitive method is imposed on me. It is a purely intuitive method that has been imposed on me." In 1947, in "The Path of Color", he first coined the term "emotive power", which means that colour can inspire strong emotions and feelings. Naturally, as I seek inspiration for my work, I explore the connections and metaphors he proposed. For example, the blocks of colour in my paintings, I see them not only as a composition, but also as a container that holds and encapsulates my spirit.
At the same time, my work is influenced by Jade Fodujutimi, whose paintings come directly from everyday life and the familiar objects around her. For example, the colour of her clothes and the colour she sees when she feels a certain emotion can determine the combination of colors she uses in a particular work. Further, her works are full of re-imagining of nature and questioning and reinventing of daily experiences, memories and self-consciousness, and she mostly uses bold colour clashes and blocky, flat modernist art forms to create her works, aiming to present her understanding of the natural world and the release of her self-consciousness. Therefore, inspired by her paintings, together with my own individual spiritual will and pursuit of the real world, with the help of complex and entangled lines and warm and cold contrasting tones, together with the combination of abstracted blocks, I reconstructed the formal language to show my inner world and subjective emotions.
Paintings by Fade Fodujutimi
By analysing her recent works, I have found that most of her paintings are probably made up of 5-6 layers.
（Taking the following work as an example）
My guess and analysis are the following:
Layer 1: She usually uses a very small amount of higher brightness and vibrant colors mixed with a lot of medium (Liquin Original), brushing over the picture with a big brush and leaving brush strokes.
On the second level, she may be using different blocks of high brightness, low purity colors in combination.
Layer 3: She may use low purity, low lightness colors, combined with momentum, combined with lots of mediums and brushes for an overall coverage of the picture.
Layer 4: She may add localized blocks of fluorescent colors and high luminosity solid colors, and use the corresponding complementary colors, combined with mediums for localized repeated over-painting, leaving quick strokes and some areas of white space.
Layer 5: She may use two adjacent colors of the same luminosity, combined with the image for an overall over-painting.
Sixth layer: she may add a small amount of high brightness, high purity colors locally, as the most forward, bright and noticeable layer in the picture.
After I had analyzed and studied the images of her works, I also experimented with colour block matching, trying to use layers of painting and white space to make the images have more layers. At the same time, I tried to use colour blocks of different brightness and purity, combining their complementary colors to form a richer composition.
My feelings about colors, and the reason why I choosing color
Paintings by Fade Fodujutimi
Some of my colour experiments
Kandinsky used colour combinations and graphic transformations to find musicality. He used to compare colors with music, for example, he saw brownish green as the serene and smooth tone of a violin, blue-green as the high notes of a violin, and blue-green as the calmness of a viola.
In Rudoff Arnheim's Art and Visual Perception, he mentions "In the qualities we describe, the object is just as active as we are. The qualities are not something which pass from the object into our eyes, but depend just as much on the interaction of our own functions.
Therefore, if we wish to discuss the expressive qualities of colour more deeply, we must involve different artists, different authors, and different civilizations in the specific qualities they assign to specific colors. "
I have analyzed the reasons for Kandinsky's and Matisse's choice of colors .
(The following illustration is a record of my analysis)
A record of my analysis
"Art and Visual Perception" by Rudoff Arnheim's
Brice Marden believes that color is not only rational, but also a state of mind on an intuitive, sensual level. Under the influence of his viewpoint, I believe that artists, with the background of many years' experience of studying in art colleges and art history, should have already possessed a certain ability to analyze and use color rationally. However, painting is personal and contains the soul and subjective thinking of the creator. Therefore, the artist's choice of colors, besides tending to subconscious analysis of color theory, will also be influenced by personal experience and subjective emotions of the moment.
In my opinion, colors are the best tool to show my feelings about reality. The use of highly saturated, high contrast colors in combination with fluorescent colors in "The New Utopia", created in unit 1, comes from my inner choice. I want my images to convey a sense of collision, impact, and jumping, thus reflecting my personal experience in the new environment and the interweaving of my subjective emotions.
The New Utopia, oil on canvas, 92✖️152cm, 2023
Additionally, I also inspired by the use of fluorescent colors in Pop Art. The reason I chose to use fluorescent colors as large color blocks in my paintings is that fluorescent colors can be stimulated by light to produce a brighter effect than traditional pigments, and at the same time fluorescent pigments have a vibrancy and brightness that cannot be matched by ordinary pigments. In my creations, I would like to use red to express joyfulness and vitality, fluorescent powder to emphasize the feminine and romantic atmosphere of the paintings, and large areas of fluorescent orange to express bright and vibrant energy, thus correlating with my positive mindset and optimism. At the same time, I also hope to use the highly saturated fluorescent colors and bright colors in the picture to make the visual effect of the picture more impressive and to create a newer visual experience.
Why do I use line as the language of drawing?
In my paintings, I use lines as a carrier of expression and communication. During the painting process, I use the lines which are connected to my thoughts to draw subconsciously, record my feelings, vent my emotions, and project them empathetically. In this way, I hope that my paintings could contain more of my emotional experiences and thoughts, so that viewers can have a dialogue with me without relying on real-world objects, and also have a dialogue with their own hearts.
Brice Marden depicts a network of richly coloured serpentine lines in his works. Using abstract painting, he combines the interest of lines in Chinese calligraphy with the colour system of Western classicism, coupled with a minimalist aesthetic and a personal and unique way of working with materials, his work expands another way of expression in abstract painting.
Inspired by him. I began to experiment with the use of Chinese calligraphy line variations and rapid brush strokes, applying simple lines and strokes with power, as a metaphor for the high and exciting emotions I wanted to express. At the same time, I hope to rely on the different dynamic lines in painting, and the connection with the plant elements, to convey a feeling of unrestrained growth and upward movement in the picture, so as to convey the spirit of freedom. In other words, by "dancing" and "growing", I want to build a utopia of the spiritual world in the picture, just like Deleuze's conception of a "tuber" that has no fixed point of origin and opens up to any direction.
Paintings by Brice Marden
Cursive Script in Chinese Calligraphy Types
Georgiana Houghton's works are full of spiritual meanings, and she advocates experimental attempts to achieve a unique style of art, in order to reach a spiritual state. She filled each sheet of paper with woven swirls of vibrant colours forming an abstract and harmonious layering of hues and tints.
This abstract and externalized representation of the spiritual world also resonates with my artistic creation and guides me in my various experiments. Therefore, in my paintings, I also use lines as my painting elements to express emotional entanglements. In the process of creating, I keep communicating with myself, so that the paintings start from simple elements and gradually become complex, and eventually filled with all kinds of entangled lines and elements, presenting my own entangled emotions about the pain of emotional internal depletion and the desire for a better future. The cycle of uncontrollable, random changes and rational control in my images is similar to my emotions, which are constantly changing and progressing. In other words, each brushstroke in the picture is like a touch of my own heart and an antenna connected to my thought.
Drawings by Georgiana Houghton
Finally, in Unit 2, I will tend to explore more diversified painting mediums and color materials, by adding more experiments with different colors, exploring in depth the translucent properties of various pigments and color combinations, and further trying to adjust and improve on my previous modes of creation, so as to paint in a bolder and more relaxed way, and at the same time, I hope that I will incorporate more reflections on the individuality and sociability into my creations in the future.
The New Utopia, oil on canvas, 92✖️152cm, 2023
Flickering in the doldrums, oil on canvas, 70✖️52cm, 2023
Bibliography
Arnheim, R. (1965) Art and visual perception. Berkeley: University of California P.
Brice Marden (2018) Gagosian. Available at: https://gagosian.com/artists/brice-marden/ (Accessed: 22 January 2024).
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the future (no date) The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. Available at: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/hilma-af-klint (Accessed: 22 January 2024).
Jadé fadojutimi - overview (no date) Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. Available at: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/artists/39-jade-fadojutimi/overview/ (Accessed: 22 January 2024).
Kandinskij, V.V., Sadleir, M. and Stratton, R. (1977) Concerning the spiritual in art. New York: Dover Publications.
Kandinsky, W. and Kandinsky, W. (1947) Point and line to plane contribution to the analysis for the pictorial elements. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Matisse, H. (1985) Jazz. New York: Braziller.
Welcome (2020) Georgiana Houghton. Available at: https://georgianahoughton.com/ (Accessed: 22 January 2024).