John Baldessari – “I think when I’m doing art, I’m questioning how to do it.”

John Baldessari is a leading Conceptual artist. In the early 1960s, when he emerged, painting was important in his work. He painted in a gestural style but by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce pre-existing images and text often creating riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting and in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and instead made a large range of media (his interests generally still focused on the photographic image.)

Baldessari once said – “If you can’t see their face, you’re going to look at how they’re dressed, maybe their stance, their surroundings,”

We spend a lesson outside the classroom to do a an outdoor photo shoot task. In the lesson when started out in pairs throwing these yellow dodge balls up in the air and trying to frame and photograph them with no blur in the center of the view finder. The point of this task was to try and teach as how to photograph a moving object while ensuring the subject was framed correctly.

We then moved on to ‘Photo Boxing’. In this task we used a small portraiture lens on our cameras and tried to photograph our partner who was consistency moving around. This tasked also focused on moving objects and trying to capture them without motion blur.

This is an edit I created in the style of the original image were I used the paint brush tool to recreate the sky the same colour. I then cropped out the balls from my original image, turned then orange in colour and positioned them as i thought they should be.

In our final task we tried to recreate Baldessari’s image of three oranges in a straight line. He took the image by change after throwing the three oranges up in the air and capturing them in a line by chance. We tried to recreate this by our partner throwing up three tennis balls. I also created created a more abstract edit to experiment with the idea.