David Prentice was an English artist and former art teacher. He was born 1936 in Solihull and he was educated at Moseley Road Secondaey School of Art, Birmingham between 1949 and 1952, and Birmingham School of Art between 1952 and 1957. He died in 2014. In 1964 he was one of the four founding members of Birmingham Ikon Gallery.
His work features in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicargo, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and the musuem of Modern Art in New York City.
Winter Beacon, 1998 watercolour on paper
Above Llanberis Lake, Watercolour
The image of David Prentice “Above Llanberis Lake” uses a variety of blue and green shades. His work shows strong tone to create the shape of the lake and the valley that surrounds the area, this is supported by his use of shadows and light in his work. His uses the valley to tunnel the viewer’s eye to the horizon of the painting, this is where the main change in colour (from green to the blue, foreground to background) and the change in lighting is the strongest and most noticeable. The viewer’s eye is most drawn towards where the light emerges from the clouds as this is the lightest area of the painting which is followed through the sun rays.
For my second photo shoot I when to the sand dunes to further develop my work inspired by Cody William Smith. These are my best photos from the shoot. I like the idea of using bigger mirrors and incorporating more elements of people into the images. An artist I could use to help develop these ideas is Guillaume Amat.
This is the work I was trying to recreate from Cody William Smith.
Postmodernism was a movement in cultural theory and practice in response of modernism theory and practice, this took place in the mid to late twentieth century. The reaction was against the ideas and values of modernism (Modernism being a style or movement in the arts that aims to depart significantly from classical and traditional forms.) Movements that have come within postmodernism art include: Conceptual art, installation art, digital art, performance art, Intermedia and Multi-media art.
Here are some examples of photographic, sculptural, installation and design work from the postmodernism movement…
Andy Warhol’s Marilyn MonroeBarbara Kruger’s Believe Anything
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.
John Baldessari, born on the 17th of June 1931 in California, is a photographer, artist and teacher of the arts. Since the 1950’s he has been creating artwork by using techniques from various subjects such as painting, photography, montaging and text to create his own meaning behind his art.
As he was born in National City, California, he has a key artist within the west coast, as he himself and his style was completely different from other uprising artists from the same area as him.
Baldessari’s main goal was to challenge the standard ideas of art, by using imagery from films and advertisements, and using in your face contrasting shapes or textures, and covering photos, with shapes in appropriate places to fragment the photos.
I was inspired by John Baldessari to capture images of a model moving and dodging the camera, due to his photographic art being humorous, so I experimented with something that I could create into a style similar to his. I wanted my model to appear as if she is boxing, hence why she is clenching her hands into a ball to appear as if she has boxing gloves on. On my camera, I used the setting Tv, put the white balance to cloudy (approx 6000K on my camera), and set the ISO to 1/200 for this first shoot. This made my images quite sharp and clear, due to a fast shutter speed.
Experiment 2:
For this experiment, I changed my camera settings; I kept the white balance and camera setting ‘Tv’ the same, however I lowered the ISO to 1/160. I told my model to do the same technique and movements as the last shoot, where she had to try and run around and dodge to camera. I decided to make a grid layout as I felt that this repetition of similar images is easy and interesting to look at from this sort of format.
To make this grid layout, I used photoshop. My first step was to create a square canvas. Next, I went to view, new guides and clicked horizontal 450px. I did this again but changed the px to 900px. Then I repeated this for vertical guides, where I chose 450px and then did it again with the vertical option selected and put 900px.
Then I went to view and chose lock guides.
Then I opened up all my images on photoshop that I wanted to use – I chose 9 images of my model dodging the camera. I went onto each photo in photoshop and went to select, all and edit, copy.
Then I went onto the canvas I made with guides and went to edit, paste. To make my image smaller to fit on the canvas I went to edit, free transform where I could then adjust my image size. I placed it within one of the squares the guides had made. I then got the rectangular marquee tool and made a selection of what part of the image I wanted to get rid of; I wanted the image to be square, with a white border in between the image and the guidelines. Then I went to layer, layer via copy.
After that, I went onto the layers panel to the right side of the image shown above, and deleted the original layer of that image (before I cropped it) so that I was left with a cropped version of that photo which I made as a square shape.
Grid layout of experiment 2
Here is my final outcome as shown above.
Experiment 3:
I did the same game of play, where the model had to run round and dodge the camera and make actions as if she was boxing, yet I wanted to experiment with the ISO again. So, for this experiment, I lowered the ISO to 1/100. This made the images blurrier due to a slower shutter speed.
Overall contact sheet of my first ‘play’ shoot:
Here is a contact sheet of all the images of my first play experiment of using my model and getting her to dodge the camera as if she was boxing.
Experiment 4:
For this experiment, I got my model to throw up one yellow ball in the air. This was an idea inspired by Baldessari, again, as he throw oranges up into a clear sky in California. However, because the sky was cloudy and grey (unlike Baldessari’s blue sky,) I chose a yellow ball to throw into the air as I felt this would be a clearer colour to see in the dark, gloomy sky. I experimented with the ISO; the first image is with an ISO of 1/200, which made my image appear lighter. The other 2 images are where I experimented with a lower ISO so they appeared darker.
Expriment 5:
My attempts of throwing balls into the sky, inspired from Baldessari
With this experiment, I then used 3 yellow balls and got my model to throw them up into the air, again, like Baldessari’s work of throwing oranges into the sky. To achieve a similar image to his, I got my model to throw all 3 balls at the same time, so that it created a line of the 3 balls.
John Baldessari’s image of throwing oranges into the sky
John Baldessari was a leading Californian conceptual artist. Painting was important to his early work, but by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce text and pre-existing images to create riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting. In the 1970’s, he abandoned his interest in painting and began to make a diverse range of media, though his interests were based on the photographic image. Conceptual art has shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate. However, he works with light humor and materials and motifs that reflect the influence of pop art. He works with pre-existing images, arranging them in a way to suggest a narrative. He seems to distort his images – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots; this all forces us to ask how and what the image is communicating.
John Baldessari, 421 Artworks, Bio and Shows on Artsy
The image above is part of Baldessari’s approach to conceptual art during the 1970’s. This photo is of 6 people who seem to be dressed smart and professional. The image portrays normality, as it is a simple image of 5 men and 1 women that are staring out the window. Baldessari liked to incorporate into various features into his work, such as leaving us with questions about what the image is communicating and showing or trying to tell us. This aspect of the photo, where all the models seem to all be bunched near the slanted window creates this sense of uncertainty and leaves us wondering what are they all so attached on looking at? What is so interesting about what they can possibly see out the window? Additionally, Baldessari was interested in using parts of pop art in his work, as well as collaging his images with unrelated art or other images to block out objects or faces (as he has done in the image above). He has made these models faces invisible – so we don’t know what they look like, what their facial expressions are displaying, if they are talking with each other or where they are looking. Instead, he has used coloured dots to cover their faces which is similar to aspects of pop art, such as artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol., who use small coloured dots to make up their images. Again, this makes the us as an audience of his work, consider all these different factors that he his hiding from us. This is what makes his art and photographic images so intriguing, and why I was influenced to do something on a similar level to Baldessari.
For my response to Hiroshi Sugimoto, I photographed the horizon and edited the images by cropping them into squares, adjusting the contrast and applied a black and white filter. I feel that my last image in this response is the best result.
This shoot was inspired by both Baldessaris video of what is art, and then subsequently a response to throwing and lining up balls in the air. Although I believed I have mimicked the same or similar composition, and a real raw reflection of motion and a sense of reality within the images themselves. I have edited the images above to be in black and white, much like the video itself, I believe this also brings more of a directed narrative to the central character of the girl herself, and her emotional expressions of her own artistic voice. I believe I could further these images of the girl, with small aspects of coloured dots, possibly on her, to enforce more of his more pop culture concerned themes. I wanted too to capture images showing movement of her running, as this shows a more realistic approach of herself. My favourite image is the one on the bottom right, when she is running yet has direct eye contact at her camera, This demonstrates a breaking of the third dimension and relationship to which she is addressing and almost questioning the viewer on her actions.
Analysis: For this shoot it is evident that I was inspired by the artists own work of capturing ‘ a line of three tennis balls’, however, evidently I decided to focus on one larger ball, and have not successfully achieved a line of all three. Although, I belive using just one ball too creates an interesting more centered composition to the piece itself. I could however, edit the image and create an illusion of three balls, despite The fact that I could, I do not think this is the approach Baldessari would use. I believe if I was to repeat the shoot with a larger multitude of time and shots, much like the artists himself, the odds would be much greater.
