Thomas Cole

The Titan's Goblet, 1833, oil on canvas, 49 x 41 cm

The Course of the Empire: The Savage State, 1836, oil on canvas

The Course of the Empire: Desolation, 1836, oil on canvas

Romantic Landscape with Ruined Tower, 1832-1836, oil on board

The Vesper Hymn, 1838, oil on canvas, 53 x 45 cm

I am particularly interested in Cole's work because he dealt with the similar idea of mine for a series of paintings by depicting different temporal settings through a process of decline in his The Course of the Empire. These paintings move through the different possible states of being of an empire from growth to decay by depicting an imaginary city. I believe this series suggests strong ideas of the cyclical nature of civilisation as there have always been rises and falls, which can also be connected to the idea of an impending apocalypse and what comes afterwards. Cole was a Romantic painter, hence there is a dedication to the atmospheric appearance of his skies, and the contrast between the built environment and the potential force of nature in undermining human's supposed supremacy.

I also particularly find his The Titan's Goblet a fascinating image, which with its play on levels of reality would later be appreciated by the Surrealists. The endless rocky landscape Cole has painted is interrupted by the monumental stone goblet, the scale of which is indicated by the tiny sailboats floating on the water and ancient settlement constructs. I love the epic nature of this image - its fantastic  quality and play on realism and fantasy. This most gives me ideas about playing with what sort of possibilities can be generated within a painting as even though they may not be able to exist in real life, anything is possible through the medium of art. I also think that I can push the style of the dioramic models I plan on making as though I may paint using a realist style, the models do not have to be precise replicas, hence this is the making stage where I can have a lot of fun experimenting and letting my imagination run wild.

Preliminary Sketch Ideas

With some of the motifs and imagery I am beginning to pick up in my research, I wanted to start sketching out ideas for the imagery I will be generating myself. At this stage I am interested in creating a series of frames with the temporal settings of before an apocalypse, during, directly afterwards and the dystopic or utopic society that rises from the ashes. I am interested in using the motifs of the goat, moth, trees, sunsets and sublime landscape for the pre-apocalyptic imagery, and the motifs of concrete, monolithic structures, barbed wire and rubble for the dystopic/utopic imagery. It will be important to consider the colour palettes of each of these works as I think the colour will greatly influence their mood and reading, so I have also created a "literal palette" for the pre-apocalyptic work which emphasises the setting of the sun and therefore metaphorically the ending of all days. I think the during and post-apocalyptic scenes will require a more monochromatic palette, therefore black and white or sepia tones. 

Dystopia Definition

Dystopias: Definition and Characteristics
Utopia: A place, state, or condition that is ideally perfect in respect of politics,
laws, customs, and conditions.

Dystopia: A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and
the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic,
technological, moral, or totalitarian control. Dystopias, through an exaggerated
worst-case scenario, make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or
political system.

Characteristics of a Dystopian Society
• Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society.
• Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted.
• A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the society.
• Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance.
• Citizens have a fear of the outside world.
• Citizens live in a dehumanized state.
• The natural world is banished and distrusted.
• Citizens conform to uniform expectations. Individuality and dissent are bad.
• The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world.

Types of Dystopian Controls
Most dystopian works present a world in which oppressive societal control and the
illusion of a perfect society are maintained through one or more of the following
types of controls:
• Corporate control: One or more large corporations control society through
products, advertising, and/or the media. Examples include Minority Report
and Running Man.
• Bureaucratic control: Society is controlled by a mindless bureaucracy through
a tangle of red tape, relentless regulations, and incompetent government
officials. Examples in film include Brazil.
• Technological control: Society is controlled by technology—through
computers, robots, and/or scientific means. Examples include The Matrix,
The Terminator, and I, Robot.
• Philosophical/religious control: Society is controlled by philosophical or
religious ideology often enforced through a dictatorship or theocratic
government.

The Dystopian Protagonist
• often feels trapped and is struggling to escape.
• questions the existing social and political systems.
• believes or feels that something is terribly wrong with the society in which he
or she lives.
• helps the audience recognizes the negative aspects of the dystopian world
through his or her perspective.

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson926/DefinitionCharacteristics.pdf

Stephen Bush

From the Field to Figuration, 1987, oil on linen, 183 x 183 cm

Ten Pink Trucks, 1984, oil on linen, 102 x 200 cm

Oberlander Manoeuvre, 1998, oil on linen, 198 x 233 cm

Desiree, 1997, oil on linen, 198 x 239 cm

The Lure of Paris #27, 2007, oil on linen, 183 x 183 cm

Today Julie pointed me towards having a look at the work of Stephen Bush. I find him an interesting artist as it appears there are dioramic elements in his work, but he paints slightly more loosely and gesturally than I do. His paintings are strange works from the imagination, but have a basis in the real, which is an effect I am trying to create by painting from dioramas. I love his use of colour in that it is sometimes quite simple or in fact monochromatic, and at other times bright and saturated. I think my favourite imagery is his The Lure of Paris which is painted in grisaille and features Babar the Elephant dolls. This compelling mix of the recognisable and the strange works very effectively, and nothing subtracts from the subject of the work because of his use of a black and white palette. I would like to try working with these elements in my own painting and also begin to increase the size of my paintings. I really like how Bush works on canvases almost 2 metres square, and whereas I have worked a lot in the past on panels around the 30cm square mark, I would like to start increasing the scale.

Ra di Martino

One of the exhibitions I have visited recently has been Worlds In Collision at the Samstag Museum. I didn't know what to expect when I went, but I really enjoyed the works of artists Paul Laffoley and Susan Hiller, but my favourite work was by Ra di Martino. Martino is a photographic artist, and for the series of work included in the exhibition visited abandoned Star Wars sets in the North African desert and documented them. The first thing that struck me about the work was a sense of familiarity, which soon turned to realisation of the subject once I read her titles. It is fascinating that these locations even exist as I would have thought that the Lucas company would have been expected to clean up after filming, but apparently it is common practice for film crews to leave behind anything they no longer want, which creates an interesting dialogue between the power of wealthy countries and the forced acceptance of developing companies. The other story behind these sets is that they have begun to fall into a state of decrepitude as even though Star Wars fans started to try and restore the sites after seeing Martino's images, locals to the area continue to scavenge them for building materials. There is therefore an endless cycle of mending and destroying, and the sites become akin to archaeological digs or relics from a long forgotten time. The relevance of Martino's work to my own is that there is a strong sense of the apocalyptic to be interpreted from the images of decaying architecture, and the lifelessness of the landscapes is a useful source for my own development of imagery.

Ra di Martino, No More Stars, 2010, lambda prints, 31 x 31 cm

James Gleeson

On the Verge of Becoming, 1997, oil on canvas, 134 x 200 cm

Lapsed Shadows Recycled to a Capable Coast, 1988, oil on canvas, 190 x 256 cm

Flight, 1950, oil on canvas on cardboard, 20 x 25 cm

Two Hippocritters in Tumultuous Circumstances, 1978, ink, collage on paper, 102 x 69 cm

The Creation of Eve, 1980, charcoal, pastel, watercolour, 56 x 76 cm

I think James Gleeson is more concerned with Surrealist imagery than I will be for this semester, but it is still very much worthwhile studying his work to investigate his use of somewhat apocalyptic imagery. Gleeson's forms are very experimental, suggesting beings and creatures but formed by swirls of colour and mixtures of paint. His work is not representational, and yet there is the recognition of a possible elbow, a breast, a leg, a face and all other parts within his dreamy collections. I think Gleeson's use of colour is definitely apocalyptic in nature, particularly in the case of his Lapsed Shadows Recycled to a Capable Coast with its rich browns and flame-like paint eruptions. I like his use of muted palettes but that sometimes include pops of colour (e.g. the orange in On the Verge of Becoming), which gives the painting movement and vibrancy. I think what I take away from Gleeson's work is the adage to experiment, as whilst his forms are suggestive, they are not explicit, allowing for the conveyance of his conceptual ideas without sacrificing the aesthetic interest of the final painting.  

Mars NASA Imagery

www.nasa.gov

As a further source for apocalyptic imagery, I have decided to look at photographs of other planets, and I've particularly found some interesting images from NASA's library of photographs of Mars. These photographs are useful as they show a landscape which has no life, and are therefore examples of what we are left with when everything we know is gone. I am most interested in using these images to help design the landscape of my dioramas.

Vanitas symbols and motifs

Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life, 1630, oil on panel, 39 x 56 cm

Phillipe de Champaigne, Still Life with a Skull, 1671, oil on panel, 28 x 37 cm

Abraham Mignon, Vanitas, 17th C, oil on canvas

Willem Claesz Heda, Still Life, 1634, oil on wood, 43 x 57 cm

Jan Vermeulen, Vanitas Still Life, 1654, oil on panel, 73 x 57 cm

I think that my topic this semester of depicting utopic/dystopic imagery will lead me towards investigating Vanitas imagery. Just as I am looking to pick up on symbolism and motifs in films, it is also important to look at art history and the traditions of its depiction there. From these historic artists, I am particularly seeing the trends of depicting skulls, books/paper, flowers, hourglasses, poisonous creatures and broken glass. I will need to create maquettes of these sorts of objects in order to paint them from dioramas.

John Martin

Macbeth, 1820, oil on canvas, 86 x 65 cm

Pandemonium, 1841, oil on canvas, 123 x 184 cm

The Evening of the Deluge, 1828, mezzotint and engraving, 60 x 82 cm

The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-1853, oil paint on canvas, 196 x 303 cm

The Last Judgement, 1853, oil on canvas, 197 x 326 cm

I find myself constantly referring to the paintings of John Martin as I believe they are an excellent example of how to arrest your audience through wonderment and awe. The first painting I ever saw by Martin was his Macbeth, and I remember feeling breathless by seeing it expanded to fit a lecture hall screen with its fantastical cloud formations and the utter dwarfing of human existence. It was these qualities that first interested me in studying his imagery, and it was not until later that I realised Martin had in fact dealt with apocalyptic imagery directly through his series of illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost. Though Martin's paintings are inarguably exaggerated, I can't help but love his theatrical spaces, nightmarish lighting effects and ominous colour palettes. According to Romanticism by Norbert Wolf (Taschen, Germany, 2007), Pandemonium refers to a passage in the first book of Paradise Lost which states "Pandemonium, the palace of Satan, rises suddenly built out of the deep", and features what is described as a "hybrid administration building in a totalitarian state" (p. 80). Martin also depicted eruptions and deluges, continuing with this thematic exploration. Even though Martin's landscapes are mostly unrealistic, I love how atmospheric they are, with strong touches of red and yellow amongst the greys, blues and browns foreshadowing impending doom. I think this draws the viewer into the painting really effectively as we wonder what has preceded the still of the narrative, and imagine what is going to happen next. Even though the human figures are miniaturised, I feel that we care for them as individuals and emphasise with their battle against the raw forces of nature.

I find Martin's work really inspiring towards making work with a narrative basis through borrowing stories from history, the present, and even constructed from my imagination. These paintings also conjure for me ideas of an entity compressed into a single frame, which I think links to the same ideas of a landscape within a diorama that I am experimenting with in my current work.

Lecture Notes, Searching for Information for Studio Proposal

-Roy Denim, coolhunting.com

Adriana Ciccone

Recurring terms - themes begin to emerge - books, journal articles, images/artworks

Brainstorm about idea - themes & ideas - related words
ARTstor, Oxford Art Online, Trove, Google Art Project
famous literary books, history books

*Create a mind map of ideas!
Library search - apocalypse painting, dystopia painting

*Visual Arts Subject Guide (Access)
Exhibition catalogues -  type exhibitions into Library catalogue search box
Art and Architecture Complete Image Collection (under More)
Art and Architecture Complete, ART bibliographies Modern, Informit Arts databases, JSTOR
-try multidisciplinary databases

Research starters - Sociology database- broad theoretical scope

feminis* - any ending of word
look at what subject terms are used for a particular article, and then employ them as your own search terms
Library Home Page - Subject Guides - Browse A-Z - Visual Arts

*Proposal must demonstrate understanding of the topic already! Not just what you WILL do!

Google Scholar

Ultimate purpose of proposal - put our work in context of other painters, theory, methodology

key words of train of thought - natural progression into different direction

Ruins - materiality - space and time - Stonehenge - druids - celtic - culture - beliefs

WHY SHOUD YOUR OBJECT BE NEW TO THIS WORLD?

Apocalyptic Artists

Benjamin West, Cityscape with Gathering Clouds, oil on paper, 3.8 x 6.4 cm

Philippe Jaques de Loutherbourg, Avalanche dans les Alpes, 1803, oil on canvas, 111 x 162 cm

William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, 1795, watercolour, 44 x 58 cm

JMW Turner, The Deluge, 1805, oil on canvas, 143 x 235 cm

Samuel Colman,  The Rock of Salvation, 1837, oil on canvas, 61 x 74 cm

Francis Danby, The Deluge, 1840, oil on canvas, 284 x 452 cm

Each of these artists who work with apocalyptic imagery I found within the text The Apocalyptic Sublime by M D Paley (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986). I am beginning to develop the idea that a lot of historical artists who dealt with ideas surrounding the apocalypse predominantly conveyed these ideas through landscape paintings. This allowed for awe-inspiring atmospheric effects to be depicted, and convey to the viewer a sense of the magnitude of the imagined events. I am sensing a common theme between many of the artists I am looking at to pay a lot of attention to rendering in very detailed and ominous cloud formations, often with the sky taking up two thirds of the picture frame. There is a tendency to couple these clouds with a sunset, and I particularly love the subtlety of Benjamin West's Cityscape with Gathering Clouds where the sun is just a small pulsing dot of red amongst a sea of blue shadows. As there is a theme in depicting apocalyptic imagery in working with the biblical sense of a flood, a deluge, rough and tumultuous seas fight against dwarfed human figures, such as in JMW Turner's The Deluge. I love how a lot of these artists work with fairly muted palettes shot through with some sort of vibrant orange or red as I believe it truly instills within us a sense of horror and dread. Coupled with this terror though is also an evident pursuit of depicting the sublime as there is true beauty in these scenes as equally as there is destruction and chaos. For me, I think it will be important to consider what sort of scale I want to work at and how zoomed out from the images I am generating the standpoint of the viewer will be. I will also need to consider how to instill such a sense of atmospheric mood in my work or whether I want my work to differ by playing with this idea and whether or not it is present in the paintings as perhaps this is more of a contemporary stance on apocalyptic imagery.  

Brainstorming

Dark Heart at the Art Gallery of South Australia

I have now visited the Dark Heart exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia a couple of times, and I am very much enjoying how the themes some of the artists are considering tie in with my own work for this semester. I particularly like the work of Shoufay Derz with her use of the symbolism of the moth. As stated in the text displayed next to the work, the moth in many cultures is considered to indicate death, therefore Derz has created a contemporary vanitas image discussing mortality and the passage of time. I also loved the surrealist elements and creativity of Martin Bell's Untitled works, the first being a huge ink drawing and the second a series of "paintings" done using modelling clay on wooden panels. I thought the panels especially were fantastic as the colours achievable with the clay were vibrant and energetic, and the nature of the clay meant each of the panels had a fascinating textural surface. Whilst I think I will be sticking to using paint to create my work, I am inspired by the sculptural works in the exhibition for materials I can use for the model making stage. I also enjoyed the quirkiness of Brendan Huntley's clay heads and found his use of colour aesthetically pleasing, and Tony Albert's collage works as I love to incorporate paper where I can as a medium and method. Overall, I thought the Dark Heart exhibition was a successfully curated one with many diverse and interesting artworks to look at, and I think perhaps what I have taken away from it most is encouragement to pursue my conceptual ideas as they can have a dark conceptual basis, but still be visually enjoyable and even playful.

Tony Garifalakis, Mob rule, 2013, 85 enamel on offset print 

Martin Bell, Unititled, 2013, ink on BFK Rives paper

Martin Bell, Untitled, 2012-2013, modelling clay on wooden board

Brendan Huntley, You're Welcome, 2012-2013, stoneware, terracotta, raku, porcelain, slip, glaze and enamelled wooden bats

Tony Albert, 108, 2011-2013, 99 mixed media collages and 9 houses of cards

Fiona Hall, Out of my tree, 2013-2014, mixed media

Shoufay Derz, Depart Without Return, 2011, HD video looped

Julia de Ville, Phantasmagoria, 2013, mixed media installation

Trent Parke, Street Portrait Series, 2013, pigment prints, dimensions variable

Ben Quilty, The Island, 2013, oil and acrylic on linen

Alex Seton, Someone died trying to have a life like mine, 2013, Wombeyan marble, nylon webbing, dimensions variable