Tuesday, 25 August 2015
Friday, 10 July 2015
Exercise 1:3 - Establishing convensions
Using internet searches and any other resources, find at least 12 examples of eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape paintings. Consider the same observations as in exercise 1.
Wooded landscape 18th century - Verburgh, Dionys (1722 - 1722) (Dutch)
A picture of landscape orientation. Bordered by trees with a cloudy sky, river in background, sandy lane in foreground. People/statue in bottom right of the image, walls & buildings are small in the background. The mood? looks like a group of people on a day out to look at the statue.
River Scene with Bathers - Vernet, Claude Joseph (1714 - 1789) (French)
A picture of landscape orientation. A shallow river winding through a valley lined with trees, there is a cloudy sky, the image is bodered with trees. There are bathers in and out of the water swimming and cleaning clothes as well as bystanders. There are larger/nearer figures in the bottom right of the image with smaller figures in the bottom third of the image. The mood? a relaxed, sunny day of mostly leisure.
Cicero and his Friends, Atticus and Quintus - 1714 - 1782 (Welsh)
Again landscape orientation. A riverside location with trees & hills in the background and again bordered by trees. Three people in the bottom right corner of the frame looking patiently at something. The mood? relaxed and comfortable.
Wooded landscape 18th century - Verburgh, Dionys (1722 - 1722) (Dutch)
A picture of landscape orientation. Bordered by trees with a cloudy sky, river in background, sandy lane in foreground. People/statue in bottom right of the image, walls & buildings are small in the background. The mood? looks like a group of people on a day out to look at the statue.
River Scene with Bathers - Vernet, Claude Joseph (1714 - 1789) (French)
A picture of landscape orientation. A shallow river winding through a valley lined with trees, there is a cloudy sky, the image is bodered with trees. There are bathers in and out of the water swimming and cleaning clothes as well as bystanders. There are larger/nearer figures in the bottom right of the image with smaller figures in the bottom third of the image. The mood? a relaxed, sunny day of mostly leisure.
Cicero and his Friends, Atticus and Quintus - 1714 - 1782 (Welsh)
Again landscape orientation. A riverside location with trees & hills in the background and again bordered by trees. Three people in the bottom right corner of the frame looking patiently at something. The mood? relaxed and comfortable.
Thursday, 9 July 2015
Project: Pictorialism
"Pictorialism is only an exaggeration of what the photograph thinks of itself" (Bartnes 1982 p31)
Some early photographers believed that whilst it had its practical applications, photography also had potential as an expressive medium, and that is was possible to conceive of photographs not just as images that rendered an objective, optical analogy of an object or a scene, but as subjective impressions - as pictures. Some painters, such as Oscar Rejlander (1857-75), saw the potential offered by photography and adopted it as their principal mode of expression. This debate came to a head in the 1890's when the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, founded by Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), split from the organisation that would become the Royal Photographic Society, arguing that the organisation was too preoccupied with the scientific rather than the artistic side of photography. Ironically pictorialism, which was the style and approach of the Linked Ring, was soon adopted by the RPS and remains a strong element of the institute.
This image is an example of the work of the Linked Ring, by Henry Peach Robinson, it depicts a dying young woman, with family looking on, helpless.
Dying woman
The Linked Ring considered photographic prints could be considered as a work of art, the pictorial approach was not necessarily to do with the apparatus and related chemistry, the central element lay in the printing process, which left brush strokes using the photo sensitive coating to the surfaces of the prints, revealing to the viewer the unique hand and artistry of the maker. Alternative processes rendered images with less clarity and imposed a more atmospheric aesthetic.
"like Talbot's images, they depend upon a known visual language and convention, as found in the work of contemporary painters like Millais and Holman Hunt. They are, as much as Talbot's work, examples of the photography as a painting' Rejlanders 'the two ways of life (1857)
Rejlander and Robinson's photographs were met with scornful distain by contemporaries such as Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), who strongly believed in a purer photographic way of seeing. Emerson accumulated a large body of work on traditional rural practices around the Norfolk broads.
Coming home from the marches - Peter Henry Emerson 1996
Justin Pertyke made a similar large body of work around East Anglia, which has been related to Emerson's work, it give a view of the hard work in a rural environment with pieces of modern day life which are easily recognised.
Justin Partyka - field work in Norfolk
The norm withing pictorialism remains the production of singular, one-off pieces, designed to convey the maker's mood at the moment it was made and to satisfy the eyes of the viewer. The singular image tradition as apposed to working with series or sequences of images.
Some early photographers believed that whilst it had its practical applications, photography also had potential as an expressive medium, and that is was possible to conceive of photographs not just as images that rendered an objective, optical analogy of an object or a scene, but as subjective impressions - as pictures. Some painters, such as Oscar Rejlander (1857-75), saw the potential offered by photography and adopted it as their principal mode of expression. This debate came to a head in the 1890's when the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, founded by Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), split from the organisation that would become the Royal Photographic Society, arguing that the organisation was too preoccupied with the scientific rather than the artistic side of photography. Ironically pictorialism, which was the style and approach of the Linked Ring, was soon adopted by the RPS and remains a strong element of the institute.
This image is an example of the work of the Linked Ring, by Henry Peach Robinson, it depicts a dying young woman, with family looking on, helpless.
Dying woman
The Linked Ring considered photographic prints could be considered as a work of art, the pictorial approach was not necessarily to do with the apparatus and related chemistry, the central element lay in the printing process, which left brush strokes using the photo sensitive coating to the surfaces of the prints, revealing to the viewer the unique hand and artistry of the maker. Alternative processes rendered images with less clarity and imposed a more atmospheric aesthetic.
"like Talbot's images, they depend upon a known visual language and convention, as found in the work of contemporary painters like Millais and Holman Hunt. They are, as much as Talbot's work, examples of the photography as a painting' Rejlanders 'the two ways of life (1857)
Rejlander and Robinson's photographs were met with scornful distain by contemporaries such as Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), who strongly believed in a purer photographic way of seeing. Emerson accumulated a large body of work on traditional rural practices around the Norfolk broads.
Coming home from the marches - Peter Henry Emerson 1996
Justin Pertyke made a similar large body of work around East Anglia, which has been related to Emerson's work, it give a view of the hard work in a rural environment with pieces of modern day life which are easily recognised.
Justin Partyka - field work in Norfolk
The norm withing pictorialism remains the production of singular, one-off pieces, designed to convey the maker's mood at the moment it was made and to satisfy the eyes of the viewer. The singular image tradition as apposed to working with series or sequences of images.
Wednesday, 8 July 2015
Exercise 1.2: Photography in the museum or in the gallery?
For this exercise I am to read and summarise the key points of Rosaling Krauss’s essay ‘Photography’s Discursive Spaces Landscape/View’.
Tuesday, 7 July 2015
Early photography and painting
To expand my knowledge I need to look at what has been done before and also to consider the genesis of the photographic process, and how closely early photography related to painting. Largely due to William Henry Fox Talbot's (1800-77) frustration at being unable to draw or paint. At Lake Como, Italy in 1833, Fox Talbot found a way to fix the image with the camera lucida, which was an aid to drawing employed by painters including Vermeer and a popular gadget for the upper-class Victorian traveler. Many of Fox Talbot's photographic experiments took as inspiration subjects and views that were typical of painting and other related media.
By placing a sheet of paper coated with light-sensitive silver salts in a camera and exposing it to light, Talbot produced, by further development, and fixing the latent camera image, a negative (callotype) of his subject. the negative, when placed in contact with a similarly sensitised paper and further exposed to light, inverted the values of the negative to produce the positive print.
This process remained central to the evolution of the medium.
In early decades (1840's to 1890's) the two-stage negative positive process underwent rapid technical and material advances, driven by tying to achieve and improve quality, and reduce the length of exposure time, which led to the introduction of the use of glass as the negative and 2 layer paper.
1870's saw the start of gelatin emulsion, which led to enlarging in the early 1900's when nitrate film was available to a wider audience. Initially used in film making, nitrate was the first commercially available, flexible, plasticized film base. As nitrate was flammable and chemically unstable, it's use was replaced with cellulose acetate.
1942, Kodac film was commercially available, like monochrome but with the inclusion of cyan blue, yellow and magenta dyes.
Nitrate was discontinued in the late 1940's, acetate remained in use to the early 1970's when it was replaced with polyester film.
Source: www.vam.ac.uk - Victoria & Albert Museum
This process remained central to the evolution of the medium.
In early decades (1840's to 1890's) the two-stage negative positive process underwent rapid technical and material advances, driven by tying to achieve and improve quality, and reduce the length of exposure time, which led to the introduction of the use of glass as the negative and 2 layer paper.
1870's saw the start of gelatin emulsion, which led to enlarging in the early 1900's when nitrate film was available to a wider audience. Initially used in film making, nitrate was the first commercially available, flexible, plasticized film base. As nitrate was flammable and chemically unstable, it's use was replaced with cellulose acetate.
1942, Kodac film was commercially available, like monochrome but with the inclusion of cyan blue, yellow and magenta dyes.
Nitrate was discontinued in the late 1940's, acetate remained in use to the early 1970's when it was replaced with polyester film.
Source: www.vam.ac.uk - Victoria & Albert Museum
Monday, 6 July 2015
Exercise 1:1 Preconceptions
For this first exercise I needed to produce a very rough sketch of a ‘landscape’ picture. The purpose of this exercise was to examine my preconceptions about the genre. The ‘landscape’ I had in my mind when drawing my sketch was that of the view of the vista from high up on ‘The Longmynd’ in my home county of Shropshire, where the view can only be described as spectacular with the many hills visible far into the distance. There is a dramatic skyline, and the houses & church of the small town of Church Stretton in the valley.
The image was drawn as a landscape – I didn’t consider another orientation other than landscape, the natural choice for me, maybe because all the landscapes I’ve come across as paintings in galleries etc have been landscape.
The terrain depicted is very rural with little urban detail other than the small town visible in the depths of the valley. The many hills extend deep into the image adding depth and detail.
There aren’t any people visible in my sketch but there is the suggestion of people living in the town, although the addition of people perhaps walking would have fitted well.
The mood of the picture is quite peaceful I think, the wide open space giving the viewer the feeling of openness & freedom.
The view I had in mind:
Sunday, 5 July 2015
Project: thinking about landscape
When I think of a landscape, paintings by the great painters of our time spring to mind....and not much more really. I like the idea of urban landscape, but what is this exactly? what does it include, what does it try to convey? I enrolled on this course in order to expand my knowledge and therefore appreciation of what landscape is and to create my own interpretation of landscape that means something to me. This course will be a huge challenge to me as it's my first level 2 course after competing 3 level 1 courses. My first impression of the course material is...there's quite a lot of it, and secondly, there is little requirement to take photos, which is the element of the course which I enjoy most, I've struggled to find the words to write when descriptive input has been required, and I don't really have the time to read a great deal. But I'm up for the challenge, have a desire to improve and achieve the standard level 2 requires.
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