Shoot 1 – studio shoot experimenting with flowers. I will use a torch to adjust the lighting for my images and will get someone to hold this torch so I can make successful images. As this shoot is adjusted with artificial light, I do not have to do this shoot at a specific time of the day.
Shoot 2 – shoot around my house focusing on light and darkness. I will go in the garden of my house at around 5:30pm when the sun is setting. I want to also focus on repetition within looking into light and darkness, for example I have blinds in my house where the sun shines onto them to create light and dark tones on the blinds, as well as other interesting aspects in and around my house that create light and darkness.
Shoot 3 – shoot focusing on architecture and how light and darkness (shadows) are portrayed onto buildings.
Shoot 4 – shoot using a dark room to create images using different objects and models such as glow sticks, lights and using a long exposure technique with a waving torch to show the variation of light and dark tones.
Shoot 5 – shoot focusing on cutlery and using light to create shadows of darkness. shoot at the beach focusing on seascapes and interesting nature objects on and around the beach that fits into light and darkness.
Shoot 6 – shoot focusing on boats on the beach and how their specific architecture creates interesting light and dark aspects.
Shoot 7 – shoot focusing on cutlery and how using artificial light can create interesting shadows that portray light and darkness.
Shoot 8 – shoot focusing on nature and how light and darkness effects nature in different ways.
Field painting was a term that originally was applied to the work from about 1950 of three American abstract expressionist painters, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still. The words ‘colour field painters’ was the title of the chapter dealing with these artists in the American scholar Irvine Sandler’s ground-breaking history, Abstract Expressionism, published 1970.
From around 1960 a more purely abstract form of colour field painting emerged in the work of Helen Frankenhaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas, Sam Gilliam and others. It differed from abstract expressionism in that these artists eliminated both the emotional, mythic or religious content of the earlier movement, and the highly personal and painterly or gestural application associated with it. In 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with this development was organised by the critic Clement Greenberg at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction, a term often also used to describe the work of the 1960 generation and their successors.
In Britain there was a major development of colour field painting in the 1960s in the work of Robyn Denny, John Hoyland, Richard Smith and others. Some examples of field paintings can be seen below:
Color Field Paintings emerged out of the attempts of several artists in the late 1940s to devise a modern, mythic art. Seeking to connect with the primordial emotions locked in ancient myths, rather than the symbols themselves, they sought a new style that would do away with any suggestion of illustration.The style was championed most enthusiastically by critic Clement Greenberg, who acclaimed the advances it achieved in the realm of form and composition. Bemoaning what he saw as the increasingly imitative, academic qualities of some action painters, he argued that Color Field Painting represented the way forward. His advocacy of the style proved highly influential.
From here I wanted to explore the typical aspects that could be found within many field paintings. To do this I would need to analyse a painting and look at the technical, visual and conceptual ideas behind each brush stroke. By doing this I would like to take inspiration from this and use it towards a future shoot regarding Franco Fontana, using a highly saturation landscape to create abstract work which highlight the texture and patterns that can be found in everyday life regarding hills around the coast. The painting I have chosen to analyse is called White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) by Mark Rothko:
Technical: The painting, top to bottom, signifies Rothko’s multiform style of abstract painting. A rose ground, darker in color on top and paler at the bottom, holds a horizontal yellow rectangle, followed by a black horizontal strip. A white rectangular band is in the center of the painting, and the bottom is lavender. Several tones of the colors were used, establishing the effect of a wide range of mood and atmosphere. Whilst not being that technical, the lack of form or structure presents the viewer with a piece that becomes aesthetic to the eye, however its simplicity provides effectiveness from how it allows the viewer’s mind to wonder and interpret each painting to a more personal level.
Visual: Mark Rothko continued to simplify the compositional elements of his paintings. In 1950, he began to divide the canvas into horizontal bands of color. Despite the frontal composition and absence of spatial illusionism in these works, the broad bands of color appear simultaneously to float in front of the picture plane and to merge with the color field upon which they are place, as in White Center (yellow pink and lavender on rose), 1950. A luminosity results from the repeated layering of thin washes of paint, which allows some underpainting to show through the upper coats. In each work of this period, Rothko sought only subtle variations in proportion and color, yet achieved within this limited format a broad range of emotions and moods. The photo at the top displays this painting’s supreme color choices, namely yellow, pink and lavender on rose.
Conceptual:
The piece represents Rothko’s love for reduction, colour, shape, balance, depth and composition, all of which are surrounded by cloudy edges against a undetermined backdrop. The idea behind the piece was to reduce the colours and the forms expanded in size, dwarfing the background which disappears behind the towering coloured forms. Many can interpret it as a dominance of colour using vivid and lush colours provide contrast and symmetry, for many it presents us with the idea that Rothko is enveloping the viewer and inviting us to contemplate and emotively respond to the space he has created.
Black and white images are authentic, they help us trace mans history step by step to his modern state. Its classical feel holds its true beauty. The first camera photography were invented in the 1820s, before that time, people relied heavily on traditional media for capturing images, for example, paintings, sketches, and drawings. However, when it emerged, it seemed to vividly capture more information or detail about an object than the traditional media.The first successful black and white image was taken by Joseph Nicephore Niepce a French developer. However, it got destroyed as the attempted to make copies of it. He was again successful in 1825, where he managed to produce a black and white image of a window
Printing is an ancient art, and colour printing has been possible in some ways from the time coloured inks were produced. In the modern era, for financial and other practical reasons, black-and-white printing has been very common through the 20th century. However, with the technology of the 21st century, home colour printers, which can produce colour photographs, are common and relatively inexpensive, a technology relatively unimaginable in the mid-20th century.Most American newspapers were black-and-white until the early 1980’s remained in black-and-white until the 1990s. Some claim that USA Today was the major impetus for the change to colour. In the UK, colour was only slowly introduced from the mid-1980s. Even today, many newspapers restrict colour photographs to the front and other prominent pages since mass-producing photographs in black-and-white is considerably less expensive than colour.
image analysis: I chose this image fo a multitude of reasons, both the composition is of a structured straight build, however, the angle of the lens creates a circular notion of growth and furthers the ideologies of a growing stark area of space. Although you are able to see the detail within the lines and the sense of narratology within the structuralism. despite there not being a choice within the fact of using colour of using black and white, It is clear this image is the most effective within the black and white tonal colours.
Black-and-white images are not usually starkly contrasted black and white. They combine black and white in a continuum producing a range of shades of gray. Further, many monochrome prints in still photography, especially those produced earlier in its development, were in sepia (mainly for archival stability), which yielded richer, subtler shading than reproductions in plain black-and-white. Despite colour being the primary conversion of photos, black-and-white photography has continued to be a popular medium for art photography, as shown in the picture by the well-known photographer Ansel Adams. This can take the form of black-and-white film or digital conversion to grayscale, with optional digital image editing manipulation to enhance the results. For amateur use certain companies such as Kodak manufactured black-and-white disposable cameras until 2009. Also, certain films are produced today which give black-and-white images using the ubiquitous C41 colour process. Colour can be a distraction; it can be dull and lifeless. One of the tasks of photographers is to simplify an image, distilling a scene down to its essence. Sometimes, that essence is colourless. Ansel Adams, discussing the differences between the two types of photography, said, “I can get a far greater sense of ‘colour’ through a well-planned and executed black and white image than I have ever achieved with colour photography.” When researching black and white photography, it is said to be something more then just a filter, as explained here ‘ There are seven essential elements of top-notch black and white photographs, which you’ll see shortly. First, though, is the most important thing to remember: You need to have a reason for shooting in black and white.Not every subject works well in monochrome. So, always ask yourself: Why are you eliminating colour from a particular photo? What makes it so important to shoot your subject that way?’ After considering this, I wondered what effect my images had upon the effect of the image itself. I decided all of the images I had edited to be in black and white were all for a purpose, and the direct effect of the colours created a more interesting effect to the final image itself, and a successful final composition.
