After my interim show I have focused my work in this series solely on paying homage to Matisse. Initially I elected to show only images based on Matisse for the interim show, this was in order to keep some sort of continuity across my images. But when looking at all the images I had created I felt that the strongest images had come from those replicating Matisse’s work. I felt that the manner in which Matisse painted that created a strong base for the work that I had been creating. The way that the objects had been painted with the strong defined edges linked to the way that my collages had placed together images that are clearly not taken with the same lens.
Matisse’s work is made up of these objects with bold outlines that house this beautiful textures and colours. In my work cutting out these resemblances also causes quite a hard edge. They must be placed according to the original painting but I have begun to add a few tricks in order to fit the collages together much more fluidly. These images are never going to fool the eye in the same way that a straight photograph does. By adding things like drop shadows, perspective wraps and transparencies, I can begin to create a more accurate image and blur the lines to touch on representation. The image still remains filled with a conjunction of perspectives and image qualities and that atmosphere of uncertainty is sure to remain, but I feel that by subtly manipulating the image it gives a striking immediate impact that can trick us. As we look closer the images begins to unfold and fall apart as we look in detail. This is something that is true of any image embed online, its is always going to have its quality compromised, its going to sit in a pool of images that are interfering its context and its will always be possible to appropriate these images as simply as copy and paste.
Matisse’s eyes help changed the world, the way that his art evolved throughout his life is incredible. Of course all the other artists that I had been using have a huge amount of notoriety but Matisse’s practice transformed so dramatically. I am encountering most of Matisse’s work at a stage of his carer just before it transitioned away from tradition. Of course there were health implications that pushed his work into something wholly different. There are hints of change within some of these works, you can tell he is straying further away from a need of representation. I think that the way that matisse saw the world is fundamental to this work. His health meant that his eyes were increasingly distorting how he interpreted shapes and colour, and I believe that there is similar comparison with the way we see the world through the internet. The internet’s very nature distorts interpretation. Values of images become reduced as context becomes completely twisted. If we only had a vision of our world from what we experienced on the internet it would be fundamentally detracted from our normal realities. Yet it would still hint at and idea of normality. We can never be sure of the reality that Matisse saw from his eyes but there was obviously some sort of impact on the work that he created in his later years. In these still life paintings we are on the edge between representational truth and expressive interpretation. Exploring our digital world I can feel as if we are continuously trapped between truth and interpretation.
