Felicity Meachem, 50 x 75, Oil painting on canvas board, 12.13
Initially, I have always attempted to
incorporate the beauty in things that are not traditionally seen so into my artwork
– I want to expose the many conflicted perspectives of life, but especially my
own ambivalent one.
Within my art I have managed to incorporate this into various different themes and concepts. For instance, I have
enjoyed working on projects that predominantly involve the theme of embracing
flaws. This has included things such as peeling paint, and abstract pictures
from deterioration, imperfections within portraits and especially the
antithesis of the idealised human body. As well as relishing in going against
the norm, I particularly love conquering my own personal qualms. Above all, I
believe this is shown within my most recent A2 project ‘Vulnerability’. Within
this I explored the physical side as well as the psychological. I decided to
focus on the human form/portraiture in order to display vulnerable people and
their minds. My initial artists for this project have been Jenny Saville and
Lucian Freud, mainly for their explicit subject matter and heavy impasto
painting styles. I have become inspired by their
absolute concern and fascination for the flesh, the form and volume of the
human body. Their models, sitting whether for a portrait or figurative nude
painting, are all simply exposed physically and psychologically, down to their
latest flaws. With Lucian Freud I realized his painting of Leigh Bowery
is shown as a very vulnerable situation. Therefore, I decided to paint people
in several different awkward environments such as: painting my mum’s cat
scratched face, myself in hospital after having my appendix out, exposure of
skin, pulling cling film over someone’s face, putting my face in a scanner and
also scrunching up an image of myself and then painting it. This also links
with Jenny Saville’s rather masochistic concept of manipulating paint as if she
is moulding the flesh herself. This then lead to self-portraiture. When looking
back I found that painting myself seemed the most challenging as it involves
exposing the self several times. I was then brought to look at Daphne Todd who
painted her self in a convex mirror, creating a fragmented, distorted and back
to front image. It is not about what anyone else sees; she has made no attempt
to present an image of her that others would more easily recognize. The image
is about the distortions actually seen rather than trying to guess what
constitutes her likeness to others. She deals with the notion of the self as
she juggles personal identity by playing with the real relationship between the
real (outside, outer, physical) versus the abstract (inside, internal,
cerebral). I really liked this concept and started to think about why artists
paint themselves. One, for convenience as you can always count on yourself as a
model, but also to discover the self. No one can ever truly see themselves how
everyone else around them can. Mirrors, cameras and reflective surfaces are
always distorted in some shape or form. I wanted to include mirrors in my
paintings to suggest a repetition of the face and different angles of it
showing there are many sides to a person’s appearance. For the future of my
artwork, I want to be even more ambitious and challenge myself further than I
already have. I would like to take everything I have learnt and channel it into
my most desired subject matter, to paint nudes. I believe I would like this to
be my main focus while studying at degree level.
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