Still Life With Green Buffet, 1928
Still Life with Apples, Servettes and a Milkcan, 1880
Still Life With Shellfish ,1920
When selecting images I had often avoided images that seemed to complicated to recreate. But as I work my way through Matisse’s work there are some great paintings that have these draped fabrics cast over the table. Tablecloths were easy enough to find but when laid straight over the table, but I knew that it would be nearly impossible to find images that matched folded fabrics. Luckily for the first painting (Still Life with Apples, Servettes and a Milkcan) I attempted with folded fabrics I found the perfect image to replicate the napkin that sat on the table but as the fabrics became more complex I knew more would need to be done to the image. This to make this first napkin it still required being cut out from a larger image of a draped curtain that I found.
I wanted to challenge myself and also felt quite curious to how these fabrics could be constructed and what they would look like. I selected images online that had a matching pattern and texture as that fabric in the painting. I was having to manipulate the image quite heavily, cutting and moulding in order to copy the lines and added drop shadows to created folds. This was the most amount of manipulation that I had done in any of the images id created but I created a really nice effect. The paintings become wrapped around these fabrics and they add a dimension and texture that repeats its self within my collages too. Although this strayed a little away from the primary ideas of my project, basing working on images taken directly from the internet. I had still been using images that matched parts of the image but used the tools that I had available to recreate the painting. I guess its really up to the audience wether the accept me manipulating the image in this manner but personally I feel that there is enough of the original file for it to be justified.
This new process adds and extra level to this work that will allow me to start exploring images that appear more challenging. In a time line of Matisse’s work his still life’s start to delve into style that had hints closer to the cubists and futurists. I find this very interesting in relation to my work especially. The writer Stephen Mayes, in his short essay on the changing face of photography, foresees a photographic world with out the need for a ‘straight photograph’.
‘As we tumble forwards into these unknown territories there’s a curious throwback to a moment in art history when 100 years ago the Cubists revolutionised ways of seeing using a very similar (albeit analog) approach to what they saw. Picasso, Braque and others deconstructed the world and reassembled it not in terms of what they saw, but rather in terms of what they knew using multiple perspectives to depict a deeper understanding’. ’…There is no doubt that we’re moving into a space more aligned with Cubism than Modernism’ .
I feel that my images adhere to this notion perfectly, they are made up of multangular, multifaceted images that have all been captured by different lenses. They have been collected from all over the web and manipulated through digital tools. Bringing the images together they form a representation of a painting from images that before had no intention or knowledge that they were connected to Matisse. The collages transitions away from photography and away from the paintings from which they are based. The images makes an effort to become a digital painting but they remain trapped in uncertainty. We feel uncomfortable calling these images photographs yet they can never be called a painting, not in a traditional sense anyway. The image that is created captures various points of our world at a variety of times simultaneously. As a result we encounter that is multilayered, it can be approached on a variety of contextual levels that are all trying to make sense of the image saturated world that we interact with. These images definitely demand a level of interaction and understanding. Its hard to take the image for granted at face value, and I hope that it is engaging the audience enough to question what is happening within the frame and initiating their own investigation.
