USA, Oberlin College Spring 2014 Program Participant
Final Project Statement: Untitled
“Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.”Francis Bacon
From: Michael Peppiatt,Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, 1996
This series of paintings directly references the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon was influenced by the work of Pablo Picasso and more specifically the biomorphic figures in his paintings. Other emotionally raw imagery such as injured and distressed bodies and medical textbooks, crucifixions and screams, served as inspiration for his work. Bacon was interested with ideas of human torture and pain as well as the physicality of struggle and emotion. His method of merging isolated, abstract forms with distinct and desolate spaces is what influenced this series of paintings.
Taking after Bacon’s work, this series of paintings uses the paint and content to convey a similar response to his paintings. Combing two elements into one scene, object and space, the paintings convey an unidentifiable visceral intensity. The spaces in which the forms exist come from an unconscious thought or memory that developed in an unsystematic way. The grounds of the paintings were accidents that provided a ground for the image. The fragmented meat and other truncated forms act as an anchor in the spaces that provide a context and reality for the arbitrary space. The process of painting these images and the paint itself is what forms and transforms the content. Most often it is unclear what the paint will do, or how the figure will react in the space but the two direct each other in an inexact way.
Self-Portrait work with Spring Project Fellow, Mequitta Ahuja:
“Retreat from Reality” 6-week Mid-Term Project Unit:
Work-in-Progress from first studio exercise “Sight, Site & Seriality”
Intro Unit, Week 3: “Tempo Zulu” Project For the third and final week of the intro unit, for her “Tempo Zulu Project”, Abby created a proposal for a paving stone to be installed by the overlook to San Domanico, with the inscribed word “franella” (local slang for making out) responding to the tendency of locals and tourists to find this an ideal place to kiss.
Intro Unit, Week 2: “Mapping and Archiving” Project For her Mapping & Exploring Project in week 2, Abby created 2 ink drawings using lines to mark her daily walks on one an in the second to map people passing through spaces.
Intro Unit, Week 1: “Out of the Gates” Project In the first week of the program, for her “Out of the Gates” project, Abby responded to the location of Porta Ovile through sketchbook watercolor, drawings and watercolors of the brick patterns and textures, cut blocks of paper representing the bricks.