Artist Study

One of the artists I have decided to look at is David Hockney. The idea came because I had some photographs that I took on holiday in the swimming pool and I decided to cut them up, creating shapes that I felt reflected the water in the photographs. This reminded me of David Hockney’s ‘Water’ pieces and I felt that his work was inspiring and relevant to the direction I am taking my personal investigation. David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, print-maker, stage-designer and photographer. He was an important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 60s and is considered to be one of the most influential English artists of the 20^th Century.

Figure 1 - Mother

I really like his piece “Mother” which is a photographic collage that is shown in Figure 1. This piece of work consists of many copies of the same photograph of his mother that have been cut up into smaller rectangles. Hockney has over-laid these photos to create interesting lines and edges in the piece whilst also changing the shape of his mother’s face by spreading the photographs out more instead of keeping them all really condensed. He has also changed the shape by having multiple copies of some sections of the face placed next to each other in different positions which almost distorts collage and gives it a pixelated effect. I really loved how he has used the same photograph multiple times to create a collage instead of combining loads of different photographs, I feel as though it works really well because it has the same colour scheme throughout with similar tones so you can still focus on the subject of the piece which is his mother, rather than your attention being drawn away by contrasting photographs. I felt really inspired by this piece as I thought I could try a similar method but using pictures of my own family and friends which makes it more personal to me. I also thought that I could perhaps use this style to create a collage of a friend or family member who had sat through various poses in the photographs to create a new pose and body shape.

Figure 2 - Robert Littman Floating in My Pool

Another piece that I felt really inspired by was “Robert Littman Floating in My Pool” shown in Figure 2. Like Figure 1 this piece consists of a collage of cut-outs from multiple copies of the same photograph. This time Hockney has only used the images that have parts of the figure in them, with the majority of the piece being left as a white background. I feel as though this really speaks for itself and is a literal representation of fill in the blanks because the background is white which is ‘blanc’ in French and you can clearly see that the figure is mainly under water so your brain automatically starts to fill in the ‘blanks’ with the rest of the water that has been deliberately left out of the collage. Again I find it interesting how he has placed the photographs as they have created lines and edges on the piece. It is also interesting how there are two specific cut-outs that show two different parts of the body that have been completely separated from the other photographs and have been place on the right side of the piece with space between the two. Perhaps this was done to give an illusion that there are more people in the pool as these two specific cut-outs appear to be from a different photograph as the angles of the body parts are slightly different than those in the main piece of the collage, however the shorts appear to be the same so he could be layering them in a different position to give a sense of movement in his piece. As the colours and tones are so similar in the collage it is very hard to pinpoint exactly if the cut-outs are all from the same photograph or not, the photographs are very tightly placed with smaller cut-outs which makes it hard to differentiate.

Another artist I am looking at is Claire Pestaille who I found after I did a collage piece with a photograph of my mum and I discovered I had done something very similar to her Cinema II series. Whilst looking at her work I found that I quite liked what she did with her compositions and I decided to try her style of collage on my own photographs. Claire Pestaille’s work looks at historical and contemporary iconography with her pieces focusing mainly on women and femininity through disruption of photographic imagery. She uses lots of portraiture from the Golden Age of Hollywood, incorporating stills from films as well as contemporary and vintage photography.

Figure 3 - Milada Mladova, New York, 1939

I was really inspired by her ‘Crystalline’ series and particularly liked the composition shown in Figure 3 of Milada Mladova, 1939 in New York. This piece is a paper collage which consists of a disrupted vintage photograph that is geometrically divided, squared and cut, and contains duplicates of the photo which have been reassembled within the format of a grid to produce a simultaneous double. The image used is black and white is the rest of her work. The black and white I feel really helps you to focus just on the figure and the technique of the collage as your eyes are not disturbed by any other colours in the backgrounds or other areas of the image because it just focuses on tone. I think this style works very well in this composition because the movement of the squares is very subtle so you follow the path of the disruption to the right of the piece.  I was really inspired by the techniques of the gridding and wanted to incorporate this into my own work. I will use this with my coloured holiday photographs because the main colour component of these images is blue which I think will still allow the focus to be on the technique of the collage and the figure much like Pestaille’s black and white collages.

Claire Pestaille’s style of work is very different to David Hockney’s. Whilst they are both collage artists the main difference is Hockney largely uses colour in his collages unlike Pestaille who focuses on black and white and sepia. I think that the reason for this is because they use different sources to make up their compositions. Pestaille uses lots of old, vintage photographs from before coloured photography was invented where as Hockney uses a lot of Polaroid images which he has taken mainly in the 80s when coloured photography and pola-colour was widely used. You could argue that there is some similarity with gridding as David Hockney has done some collages where he has put the Polaroid images in a grid like structure with them forming square like shapes which is similar to Pestaille’s ‘Crystalline’ series however the difference being there is white space between the actual images in Hockney’s work.

Figure 4 - Motherhood

The third artist I am looking at is Annegret Soltau. She combines photographs of faces and people by tearing images and then stitching them together using thread to create a new, grotesque composition. I really like the technique she uses and I think I could take this as well as the idea of using thread and incorporate it into my collages. I could also combine the different artist styles to see if they work well together and compare them.