In an exploration of combining painting and photography, the learnt and the primal, the cooked and the raw, I decided to try interacting with negatives.
I tried scribbling coloured pastel onto film, juxtaposing the loose mark making with the scientific process of photography. Following on from my project with the memory veils, I wanted to explore how to visually represent the subjectivity of memory. Photography feels like a good framework in which to explore this since it is seemingly objective and yet each viewer/photographer views it through their subjective lens of understanding.
I interacted with both black and white and colour film. I tried abrasives such as lemon juice and scratching to see what effects might be created. I found the lemon juice did little to nothing but the effect of the scratching left an interesting impression. I then scanned the images which resulted in an almost graffiti like impression. I worked back into some of the scanned images with analogue mark making. The process was quite cyclical, revisiting the same image at different times, providing a parallel for how our perception of an image/memory changes with time.
I used film that had fairly abstract images to experiment with, but I would like to try working with images that are more representational as well to see how this affects the impression.
I thought the colour choices were random, working intuitively, however as a stepped back to look at it on the wall, I noticed I often choose the colours red, blue and green
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I tried placing camera film over a mirror of shattered glass I had created. Although I thought this could be interesting, I found it difficult to articulate what this composition said and I felt there would be more places to go with painting on the film and photographs.
OSJ Wells Fine Art 