Thursday, 30 August 2012

"Chromophobia", written by David Batchelor.

I have been reading the book "Chromophobia". Below are a few interesting quotes and ideas from the book.

From chapter five "Chromophilia".

*"Laughter is many things, of course; it is, among other things, a wordless language spoken by the body when our standard vocabularies desert us".

* "The colour chart is to commercial colours what the colour circle is to artists' colours. In a colour chart, every colour is equivalent to the independent of every other colour. There are no hierarchies, only random colour events. The colour chart divorces colour from conventional colour theory and turns every colour into a ready made. It promises autonomy for colours, in fact it offers three distinct but related types of autonomy: that of each colour from every other colour, that of colour from dictates of colour theory and that of colour from register of representation".



*Judd: "Other than the spectrum, there is no pure colour. It always occurs on a surface which has no texture or which has a texture or which is beneath a transparent surface"
            "The achievement of Pollock and others meant that the century's development of colour could continue no further than a flat surface, colour to continue had to occur in space".

*In the text "Theory of colours" by Goethe:
                   "it is worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great          predilection for vivid colour, that animals are excited to rage by certain colours, that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence".

Wednesday, 29 August 2012


Lesley Vance. 

Lesley Vance, Untitled (12), 2009
Oil on linen, 18 x 15 in. (45.7 x 38.1 cm)
 Painter, Leslie Vance creates gorgeous, tiny oil paintings on linen. Vance’s process involves painstakingly arranging still life objects, photographing them and then using the resulting image as the basis for paintings. The combination of the lack of brush strokes (Vance applies paint with a pallet knife) and the relatively untextured surface of linen give the paintings a beautiful, sensual smoothness. Inspired by the Spanish still life tradition, this influence can be seen in her luminous color palette. Lance spreads beautiful, jewel-like colors across a dark background and her paintings seem to radiate with an inner light. Their fluidity, depth and intermixing of color also bring to mind Gerhardt Richter’s masterful abstractions.
http://calitreview.com/7339



I love Lesley Vances' paintings. They are very aesthetically pleasing. I find it really interesting how she paints from still life, yet you can't really make out what it is that she is looking at. I really like how you can just enjoy the shapes for what they are rather than thinking "Oh thats a banana" or whatever. This is something that I aspire to do in my paintings. 

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Video of Robert Seidel work

// Documentation of the Projection Sculptures //
Black Mirror
Robert Seidel
Projection on Paper Sculptures in front of a Mirror
Sculpture #1: 1,6 x 1,2 x 0,8 m
Sculpture #2: 2,1m x 0,8 x 0,9 m
USA / Germany 2011