Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics.
Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist’s inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representational canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color.
Kandinsky’s most famous pieces are his abstract work, in these examples you can see his frequent use of circles in his paintings. This was another artist of whom sparked or continued that interest in circles in imagery and I would be keen to explore this further and produce responses to these artists.
Squares with Concentric Circles
Squares with Concentric Circles (above) is a small watercolor made with gouache (a type of watercolor paint) and crayon. Kandinsky created a grid composition (the “squares”). Within each square unit, he painted “concentric circles”, meaning that the circles share a central point. He believed the circle had symbolic significance relating to the mysteries of space and he used it as an abstract form to which he would create his art. Kandinsky explores many side-by-side combinations of color relationships: complementary (colors opposite each other on the color wheel, such as orange and blue), analogous (adjacent colors on the color wheel, such as red and orange), and triad (colors spaced equally on the color wheel, such as red, blue, and yellow). He varies the intensity and value of some colors, sometimes even within the same circle. The close placement of such high-value colors makes them appear to pulsate.
The painting is a study, or sketch-like investigation into a subject. Kandinsky’s quick, freehand renderings produce lopsided and irregular geometric shapes, giving the conceptual work a living, organic feel. The watercolors bleed into one another, and the artist sometimes breaks from his formula. He saw the formula as secondary to the study’s purpose, which is the experience of viewing color relationships. Kandinsky never intended for this study to be viewed as a finished work of art, but rather as a color aid to refer to while he worked on other paintings.
BAM Perspectives is a business created and run solely by Marc Le Cornu, who happens to be my father. ‘BAM’ (his nickname) began the business after becoming a trained commercial drone pilot for the States of Jersey Fire and Rescue Service a few years ago, he then created the emergency services drone team to allow all emergency services to acquire use of the Fire Service’s drone and train multiple operators with ‘BAM’ in command of the team. His passion for drones and drone photography was clearly visible from this point, he loved it and decided to buy a drone himself; a DJI Mavic. This drone was compact, light and had a good camera for its relatively small size. It was with this drone he began taking photos and videos which sparked online with many people sharing and liking his work.
Fun Fair St Helier
With this, he decided to create his own business to run part time whilst in the Station Commander/Group Commander position at the Fire Service. He came up with BAM Perspectives, he used social media to advertise almost completely free and he also created a website to sell images (which he could legally do with a commercial licence). He is the only local drone pilot to hold a dense urban area license, allowing him to fly over town (large built up areas) which other pilots simply cannot do (legally).
DJI Phantom 4 Pro Obsidian
DJI Inspire 2
DJI Mavic 2 Pro
His work mainly consists of landscape imagery, both from drone and DSLR. He has 3 drones currently, DJI Mavic 2 Pro, DJI Phantom 4 Pro Obsidian and DJI Inspire 2. Not only does he do landscape imagery, he does land survey imagery, property surveys and progress images for building sites and even the predicted window views for the Horizon Apartments site. He also takes a fine art approach with abstract imagery, his use of circles both in natural and urban landscapes is something that sparked some ideas for me to follow for a project idea.
My first Variation and Similarity photo-shoot will be based around the typology of trees. I will experiment with presenting my images in a grid format in the style of Bernd and Hilla Becher. As I am looking at the variations and similarities within the landscapes around me, and zooming in close on the environment, trees are a good subject as they show diversity within their origin, patterns of bark, size, form etc.
Shoot 2: Flowers / Leaves
My second shoot will aim to capture the variety of leaves and flowers within nature’s woodland and coastline. This shoot will focus on the variation aspect of my project and highlight the range of natural objects and the sublime beauty they hold. I will photograph the vibrant, summer leaves and flowers and the contrasting duller autumnal leaves to highlight the different products of seasons.
Shoot 3: Clouds
Clouds are an interesting topic of the natural world as they show such diversity depending on the given weather. I will hope to capture images of the sky during storm, rainy weather and juxtapose these photographs with ones taken at calmer, serene times.
Shoot 4: Water
For my 4th shoot, I will look at water; the forms, patterns and colours. I will edit a number of my photographs in the style of Hiroshi Sugimoto in black and white, exploring a deeper conceptual meaning behind water and the spiritual notions behind his work. Places I will visit will include St Ouen’s bay and Plemont.
For my first photoshoot I wanted explore repetition in nature, looking at the soft shapes that plants and natural objects create and to emphasise the fragility and beauty in the shapes using light. I am taking some inspiration from the photographer Rinko Kawauchi as i like how she focuses on everyday situations and objects, emphasising their beauty, especially in nature.
I want to go to a natural area to take photos and I think that a woods would be a good place to explore as there many different things i can take images of and would be easy to find repetition. I plan to take pictures including water i.e. the shapes of waves/ripples, reflections of trees and plants on water, things you can see through the water underneath. I also want to take photos of patterns on trees, plants and in the landscape, hopefully helping me generate more ideas for my project. The lighting in the photos i take will depend on the weather that day.
Taking inspiration from Rinko Kawauchi where she looks at the opposition of light versus shadows and life versus death, Rinko believes the fleeting nature of these dualities is what ultimately determines our fragile existence. According to Shinto, all things on earth have a spirit, hence no subject is too small or mundane for Kawauchi’s work; she also photographs “small events glimpsed in passing, conveying a sense of the transient.
Beauty and Nature
The beauty of nature can have a profound effect upon our senses, those gateways from the outer world to the inner, whether it results in disbelief in its very existence as Emerson notes, or feelings such as awe, wonder, or amazement.
Emerson offers is that “the simple perception of natural forms is a delight.” When we think of beauty in nature, we might most immediately think of things that dazzle the senses – the prominence of a mountain, the expanse of the sea, the unfolding of the life of a flower. Often it is merely the perception of these things itself which gives us pleasure, and this emotional or affective response on our part seems to be crucial to our experience of beauty. Nature is beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive. In nature we observe growth and development in living things, contrasted with the static or deteriorating state of the vast majority of that which is man-made.
(Harvard University- Beauty in Nature)
I want to try and emphasise these concepts within my photography and throughout my project. I think that this is an interesting concept and is something I have yet to explore in my other photography projects. I will also look more into ideologies of beauty and picturesque in my project. For this shoot i plan to start generic images that i can develop from in my next photoshoots. I also want to photograph relations in water as I think it’s an interesting way to look at an objects from another perspective, epically in nature.
John Baldessari is renowned as a leading Californian Conceptual artist. Painting was important to his early work: when he emerged, in the early 1960s, he was working in a gestural style. But by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce text and pre-existing images, often doing so to create riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting – as he once said, “I think when I’m doing art, I’m questioning how to do it.” And in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and made in a diverse range of media, though his interests generally centered on the photographic image. Conceptual art has shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate, yet his work has little of the austerity usually associated with that style; instead he works with light humor, and with materials and motifs that also reflect the influence of Pop Art. Baldessari has also been a famously influential teacher. His ideas, and his relaxed and innovative approach to teaching, have made an important impact on many, most notably the so-called Picture Generations, whose blend of Pop and Conceptual art was prominent in the 1980s.
Baldessari first began to move away from gestural painting when he started to work with materials from billboard posters. It prompted him to analyze how these very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating.A crucial development in Baldessari’s work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways – both using codes to convey their messages. Text began to disappear from his work in the early 1970s, and since then he has generally relied on collage, but his work has continued to operate with the same understanding of the coded character of images.
Typically, he collages together apparently unrelated categories of image or motif, yet the result is to force us to recognize that those images often communicate similar messages.On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1965, Baldessari was struck by the use of unpainted plaster to fill in missing shards of Greek vases. This prompted his interest in how images are effected by having portions removed or blotted out, and he has continued to explore this ever since. Often, the result of his alterations to photographs is to render them generic, suggesting to us that rather than capturing a special moment, or unusual event, photographs often communicate very standardized messages. Here are some examples of his works:
After looking over some of his work I decided to create a response to the project he worked on called Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line. This project attracted me because of how bizarre and unique it was, using the formation of randomized ball positions in the air to create ‘art’. I then proceeded to make a response to this by throwing various balls in the air and attempting to capture them mid-flight, using only the backdrop as the main form of contrast in the photo. I would also experiment with shutter speed where I would try to capture other moving subjects, here were my results:
Once I had completed this task I decided to pick out the three images that I thought best reflected what I wanted to experiment with, here were the results:
I really liked the idea of capturing a subject mid movement as it allowed for a new stance of photography I had not previously explored. In future shoots I could look at things like birds mid-flight or people and shadows, this would open up opportunities for further abstraction of the environment photographed as by incorporating moving things it could bring the image into life.
We thought that this artist linked in well with page 8 of the exam booklet, which is the fine art response to variation and similarity. This response was based on the artists Nick Greaves and Bluegreen Pictures.
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard’s photography of moving animals captured movement in a way that had never been done before. His work was used by both scientists and artists. He developed a miraculous process for capturing movement on film. This approach to photography influenced media and other motion animation industries to produce picture animation. In 1872, Muybridge began photographing a galloping horse in a sequence of shots. He eventually came up with a more complex method of photographing horses in motion. By 1879, he had proven that they do at times have all four hooves off the ground during their running stride. Over the next few years, he produced thousands of photographs of humans and animals in motion. Eadweard presented his photographic methods using a projection device he’d developed called the Zoopraxiscope.
Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, 1880
A picture disc for the Zoopraxiscope developed by Eadweard Muybridge (Wikipedia, 2015)
This image portrays several images of a pig running. The sequence of photos shows how the pig is moving. The colour isn’t natural because of the camera that Muybridge used. This old camera that was used in the 1800s creates a sepia, vintage effect. He usually uses images of horses, but in this particular image, he used a pig to show the contrast between the two animals, and how they move in a similar way. The repetition of the images shows the variance of each image, and how each photo differs from the others due to the pigs movement. The way they are produced in a grid makes it easier to compare all the images.
Nick Greaves
He studied geology and environmental sciences at the University of Aston in Birmingham, England. His passion and interest in Africa took him to Southern Africa in 1976. Greave’s interests in wildlife, conservation & photography originally developed independently, but slowly all these came together over the years, and he was able to combine all these passions into his current position as a multi-tasker, dividing his time as a professional safari guide, photographer and author. Nick’s love of wildlife and the outdoors quickly led to an interest in photographing the world around him, and over the years his photography has become a never ending search to capture the moods and wildlife of Africa and elsewhere. This interest has led to a full portfolio covering much of the flora, fauna, culture, and heritage of Southern Africa.
Corpinus Disseminatus Trooping Crumble Cap photograph, Nick Greaves
This image taken by Greave’s is portraying the mushrooms that appear as part of the wildlife’s nature in Africa. The repetition of the mushrooms that spiral up the branch of the tree trunk shows the variance between the mushrooms- although, they are all of a very similar size, shape and colour, which makes all the mushrooms seem very alike – this is similar to Murbridge’s work as they both take photos of the same object, yet they all vary in their own ways. In Greave’s photo, he only displays his repeated objects (mushrooms) in one single image, instead of in a grid format like Muybridge portrayed his work. Maybe this was because in Greave’s photo, the mushrooms were all bunched together already, so that it was easy for him to take his repetition photography in one image instead of putting them together in a grid layout like Muybridge did. This photo has a lot of natural colours, due to Greaves taking this image in 1996; the technology of cameras and online software at this time is obviously a lot more improved than when Muybridge took his series of images of animals in the 1800s.
For this shoot I wanted to explore the use of natural forms in abstract and unusual ways using a monochrome filter to do so. Here I would walk around on specific area photographing the subjects in a highly contrasted light, which once edited would differ visually to what I originally saw. The photographer who I wanted to use as a reference of photography for this was Aaron Siskind, someone who specialised in abstract photography within streets as a means of creating a political view. What I especially looked at in his works were how he used only monochrome filter to create this images, choosing to take an angle upon the object that completely warps it compared to its original state. Here are some examples of his works:
From here I wanted to go on to produce a mind-map, by doing this it would allow me to focus on the things I intend to photograph when on the shoot, preventing me from capturing subjects that would have no relation to what I was doing at all. Not only would this make me more efficient, but also make the results of my shoot overall more effective. Here are some of my ideas for the future shoot:
Once I had finished with my ideas I decided it was time to move onto the shoot itself. For the shoot I would be exploring the North of the Island as I found that was the area of Jersey that had the highest ratio of agriculture and natural landscapes. Using the mind-map as my reference I decided footpaths would be my main go to. Here are the results of the shoot:
Once I had finished the shoot I then decided to whittle all the images down to a selection of only ten. By doing this not only would it make it easier for me to decide on an image that best reflects the overall idea of the shoot, but also the one that both technically and visually is best. Here are my choices for the ten best images:
After I had selected the ten images I found most effective I then decided to once again whittle the selection down to now only fives images. In doing this it would allow me to analyse each image in more depth than the rest, looking at why the image was chosen, the technical aspects of it and its overall relation to the entire topic, whilst making it easier to pick the final image. Here are my choices:
I selected this image because I loved the contrast between the wall and the surrounding ivy which grows upon it. For me by photographing a slither or concrete contrasted by the ivy it produces an abstract effect where two different environments merge into one, warping the images as you make your way to the centre of it. Composition wise I found the use of the darker ivy as a border to be effective as it slowly joins with the lighter shades of the brick, making use of any negative space which could have been there whilst producing an aesthetically pleasing result. I found that the use of a higher contrast was particularly effective here as it really highlights the hidden feature within the moss and bricks, creating more depth whilst also stopping parts of the piece from becoming too eye-sore for viewers.
For this image the reason I chose it was because of the great use of a depth of field. By only focusing on one part of the mesh wire I found that it produced an abstract effect that messes with the mind regarding where the focus come into play. The detail of the actual focused wire that separates itself from the rest of the image for me creates a huge aesthetic feel, as the fluid transition from focus to out of focus really compliments each other, especially through the use of shades such as greys and blacks. Regarding the composition I really like how it is not centred in the middle, but rather the top left, this really gives a sense of depth within the piece as the background becomes blurred and the then is up to the viewer to interpret what could be surrounding the fence.
What I loved about this image was how the varying shades of the horse create an aesthetic abstract effect where each shades merges into the next. I largely chose this image because of how the composition portrays the side of the horse, with the whites coming down from the left and the rest of the piece being surrounded by black hairs which provide the photography with a natural border. What sold the image for me was how the use of a high contrast really brings out the definition within the side of the horse and the form of the body, this in a way isolate the actual horse from its side as it takes the viewer a few moments to actually figure out what the image is of, with only hints giving it away.
For this image I was drawn towards once again the depth of field within the landscape. By focusing on only one layer of the bushes it creates a feel or vastness within the photo as it highlights the sharpened ends of the branches whilst softening the rest of the area. This contrast for me really brings a sense of aestheticism over the whole image, as by using only a monochrome filter it leaves the image devoid of any distractions to rather allow us to look at the formation of the natural subjects within. The composition of the focused areas is also a major reason why I selected it, this is because of how there is a larger area of focused bush on the left which grows smaller as you progress, stopping the blurred backdrop from becoming more overpowering than it actually is.
Finally I selected this image because I loved how the overlapping twigs presented themselves as a sort of abstract mess, with there being no actual order to how or where they are coming from. I also really liked how the shadows between the twigs were really contrasted opposed to the lighter shades of the wood which consisted mostly of lighter areas. This was complimented through once again a use of depth of field which blurs some of the layers of twigs out, by doing this for me I found it to be more effective due to how its stopped any eye-sore from occurring for the viewers, prevented us from not being sure where to draw our eyes to.
Once I had analysed and selected the five images I thought were most effective regarding their technical, visual and relevance to the overall topic I then proceeded to chose my best photo:
FINAL IMAGE:
The reason I chose this as my final image was because of the composition, contrast and definition that was present inside this photo. What drew this to me the most was how the piece was perfectly focused with some use of depth of field, whilst using a variety of different shades present on the horses side to create an abstract effect that mimics the natural environment around it. In relation to the entire topic of variation and similarity I found that this image reflected well the differing aspects regarding the textures and patterns which can be found within the different landscapes of Jersey, where the North could consist of more natural ones like this, whereas the South could maybe be more concrete and urban. As well as this the image for me presents me with a new perspective regarding how textures and patterns can also be found in living things found in these particular landscapes rather than just the way you personally view the landscape as well.
Over my project, I want to portray the eight basic emotions shown by Robert Plutchik in his psychoevolutionary theory, the ‘wheel of emotions’.
I will aim to use colour representations and symbolic metaphors that I believe represent the essence of each emotion, in a range of images from portraits to still life inspired images.
In order to portray a chosen emotion, many of my images will need to be staged.
Some of the basic emotions have relations to the 7 deadly sins, which I will research to develop inspirations. The 7 deadly sins are:
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride
Two photographers that I will look at in the course of my project are Niall Mcdiarmid (Above) and Martin Parr (Below) as they both show a strong use of colour in their images to help portray a narrative.
