Crit Wall #6

Welcome to “Crit Wall“, where I offer online critiques of individual art pieces.  To submit, send me a link to one image by commenting here, or by emailing the link to me at clara(at)claralieu.com. Please, NO ATTACHMENTS. Include the media, size, and title if you have one. Only submit original, finished works, no works in progress or sketches. Artwork created for a RISD degree program course is not eligible. You’ll receive notification if your piece is selected to be critiqued. Only one submission per person please, and know that I will not be able to critique every single work due to the volume of submissions. All images will be posted anonymously.

digital photograph
dimensions variable

Probably the most successful part of this piece is the banana peel sitting in the cup on the left side of the composition. The banana peel doesn’t reveal it’s identity immediately.  The identity of the banana peel is somewhat elusive initially, and it takes some visual investigation to figure out exactly what it is one is looking at. The banana peel is suggestive of other forms in nature:  a fish, a leaf, etc. The fact that the banana peel is able to be transformed into other forms keeps things ambiguous and slightly mysterious in an engaging way.

In terms of articulation there is an effective contrast between the fuzziness of the warm pink shadows in the background against the sharpness of the banana peel.  The pink shadows have a light, airy, painterly feel to them while the edges of the banana peel are quite crisp and detailed by comparison.  This makes for a lovely combination between the two contrasting areas.

The color is handled well in this piece.  There is the feeling of a monochromatic color scheme, yet when one sits down to analyze the colors, there are many more colors than seen at first glance. The intense sharpness of the alizarin crimson color in the center of the glass on the right is a nice surprise.  This juxtaposed against the soft pink and yellow tones makes for a nice contrast. There is a brilliance and luminosity to the glass on the right hand side that creates a compelling sense of light and transparency.

Composition is the greatest weakness in this piece. The two primary objects are placed smack in the middle of the page, which makes the composition predictable and static.  Placing your subject dead center is generally not a good strategy when it comes to composition.  Generally speaking, having your subject matter slightly off center is a better way to layout the composition.  Additionally, there is almost nothing to sustain the viewer’s attention in the background, and thus a good portion of the image is wasted. If a large chunk of the background was eliminated, and the piece would be considerably stronger in terms of composition. The horizontal and vertical lines in the background are also too stable and therefore appear to be static and dull.

Past “Crit Wall” pieces are below.  Click on the images to read the critique.

   

Ask the Art Professor: Is photography art?

Welcome to “Ask the Art Professor“! Essentially an advice column for visual artists, this is your chance to ask me your questions about being an artist, the creative process, career advice, a technical question about a material, etc.  Anything from the smallest technical question to the large and philosophical is welcome. I’ll do my best to provide a thorough, comprehensive answer to your question. Submit your question by emailing me at clara(at)claralieu.com, or by posting here on this blog. All questions will be posted anonymously. Read an archive of past articles here.

Here’s today’s question:

“What is your perspective on photography being “art” ? What makes photography art if so?”

Photography can absolutely be an art form.  As far as I see it, photography is simply another medium, like painting or sculpture or film, with which one can create visual images.  Every time a new medium comes along there’s always a period of questioning whether or not that new medium can be classified as being “art”. For a long time, monoprints were not considered to be a true form of printmaking, and people are still trying to figure out right now where digital media is going in terms of being considered an art form.

The distinction I’d like to make here is that in my opinion, there is no visual medium that exists that is inherently art, all the time.  Afterall, if that were the case, everything that is visual in the world would be deemed a work of art.  Photography has a massive range of applications, and there are certainly numerous uses of photography that I would not consider to be art. This is the way it is with any other visual medium; just because something is visual does not mean that it is necessarily a work of art.

Nan Goldin

So the question becomes, where do you draw the line on what photographs are art and which are not?  There are the obvious extremes with photography:  you have fine art photographers like Ansel Adams and Nan Goldin, while on the other side of spectrum you have casual snapshots of someone’s baby taken on an iPhone. Then of course there are the millions of options in between those extremes, a lot of which are quite difficult or impossible to classify. Even the top names in fine art photography have been controversial in terms of what their work has been classified as:  both Robert Mapplethorpe and Sally Mann have created images that were trying for many audiences, and thus challenged by many as works of art.

In general, I don’t like to stamp things with a label declaring them as art or not, as there are far too many examples that blur many boundaries. Naturally, there will never be a perfect consensus of exactly which specific photographs are works of art.  I think it’s a case by case basis that you have to determine by your own personal set of standards for what makes a work of art.

Do you see photography as an art form?  Why or why not?

Related articles:
“What is the difference between fine arts and visual arts?”

Robert Mapplethorpe

Working from Photographs

Clara Lieu, Reference photograph for “Falling”

While I work on finishing up the final 13 sculptures in my current series of 50 sculptures, I’m also simultaneously preparing myself to work on the upcoming 50 figure drawings.  My preliminary process for all of my projects is extremely involved, and I generally spend much more time getting ready than I do on the actual pieces themselves. I prepare myself so heavily that by the time I’m ready to tackle the final works, everything feels very straightforward and smooth.

One of the most critical parts of the preparatory stages for me is creating my reference photographs. We were just dealing with this issue in my freshman drawing class at RISD last week.  For the first half of the semester I insist on all of their homework assignments being drawn strictly from direct observation. That experience of intensively working from life provides a crucial foundation which eventually allows them to work more fluidly with a range of different references. After midterm, I allow students to use any reference that they want. Last week was the first week of using open references, and it was apparent that many of the student drawings suffered tremendously because the initial reference photographs were so poor. Common problems I saw were:  using very low resolution photographs off the internet, using a phone to take a low quality snap shot, and using old family photographs that were collaged together.  Many artists mistakenly assume that working from photographs will be “easy”.  Actually, if your reference photographs are lousy, working from a photograph becomes a handicap rather than an advantage.

From what I’ve seen, the majority of artists do not take the time to shoot their own photographs. I’ve seen people do things as nonsensical as go onto the internet to find a picture of a tree, when there are trees right outside their window.  Making the choice to shoot your own photographs should be a no-brainer, especially with the range of technology that is now so readily available to us. I have a personal rule that if I work from photographs, the photographs must be my own. (And yes, that means if I want to draw a picture of an ostrich, trekking myself out to the zoo) I’m not saying that everyone should necessarily adopt that policy, but make every effort you can to make the photographs your own. The photographs have to be of very high quality, so that they are packed with as much visual information as possible. It’s easy to pick and choose what details you want to use from a high resolution photograph, while it is impossible to to compensate for a photograph’s lack of information and detail on your own. Lighting is also a critical component to a good reference photograph, and is one major detail that many people don’t take the time to set up or address.

Once you have strong reference photographs, that is just the beginning of the hard work. The challenge of working from a photograph is to be selective and take only what you need, and then to interpret, process, and manipulate that information visually.  I see this all the time: artists turn themselves into xerox machines and copy the photograph “verbatim”, resulting in a watered down version of the reference photograph. You know it’s a bad sign when your reference photograph looks better than your artwork. You have to ask yourself, what qualities can you create in the artwork that the photograph will never possess?  Think about the reference photograph as a departure point, from which you want to travel as far away as possible.

For “Falling”, I already have an enormous archive of multiple photography sessions with professional actress Marianna Bassham that I shot back in 2010. The first session I did with her was a session where I asked her to act out a physical interpretation of my description of depression and anxiety to her. I shot still photographs and also recorded a video at the same time. I have some incredible, intense photographs from that session. (because of Marianna’s acting, not because I’m a great photographer) The problem is that the lighting is inconsistent in the photographs, and there are many areas like the hands and feet that lack the detail that I need to be able to make these large scale drawings.  I know that I’m due for another photography session very soon.  I pretty much never get everything that I need in a single photography session, so multiple reshoots are always necessary.

Do you work from photographs?  What suggestions would you make about working from photographs?

Clara Lieu, Reference photograph for ”Falling”

Sculptures in my Etsy shop

I finished up this latest round of photographs tonight, lighting and photographing No. 34.  I’ve also decided to add these sculptures to my fine arts Etsy shop. Up until now, all of the items in the shop were digital prints, drawings, and hand pulled prints.  A select number of these face sculptures will be available in both beeswax and resin. Over the next few weeks, I’ll focus on casting pieces for my upcoming exhibition in March and for my Etsy shop.

In other news, the 2013 RISD Faculty Biennial opens at the RISD Museum of Art tomorrow evening, 6-8pm. I’ll be at the reception, so stop by and say hello if you’re in town! I have Self-Portrait No. 50 featured in the exhibition.

Exciting

This morning I got to work right away opening up the molds in order to make my first casts. As I’ve said before in previous blog posts, the first time I cast from a mold is always very exciting.  Pulling the beeswax cast out of the silicone mold is enormously satisfying, it’s part of the process that I never get tired of.

In other news, the honeymoon with my book is over, and now it’s time for the hard work to really begin.  Every day I hear from more people who are reading the manuscript for me, and I’ve been so grateful for all of the comments. Many of the comments are really testing my statements, and challenging me and making me sweat-precisely what I need to strengthen the book.

Busy & Productive

I love being so busy and productive, to me it’s the most satisfying feeling in the world. With the exception of my afternoons, I’ve pretty much been working non-stop.  Sure, my house is going to hell, but for a change, I don’t care. I’m trying to relish how great it feels right now while it lasts.  There’s so much going on in my head right now that I feel incredibly awake, alert and attentive to everything in my work. It’s absolutely wonderful.

This morning I was able to polish up the finishing touches on two faces, which means when I come back on Monday morning I’ll be able to start the casting process. Sometime this month I’m also going to go ahead and have a few of these photographs printed at a professional lab on a large scale.  I’m a little nervous about it, and part of me is anxious about handing off the work to someone else, which I’ve never done before in my process. Before these photographs, it’s all been me, hands on from beginning to end in all of my projects. So the idea of someone else’s hand coming into the process is a little scary.

Camera Focus

I discovered yet another factor that I hadn’t considered before until my husband pointed it out: what part of the face I had the camera focused on. (He has a lot more experience with photography than me, so he’s been lending me a good eye when evaluating the quality of the photographs.)Before I started deliberately thinking about it, I had been focusing on the nose because that’s where the camera happened to be pointing.  Unfortunately, this meant that everything but the tip of the nose was out of focus, so again I had to go through and redo many of the images.  Although it was a ton of work, it paid off because I ended up with the focus in the correct places, and in several cases some much better images than what I had before. After all of this troubleshooting and correcting, I think I’ve finally got my system down for shooting the photographs.

Consistency

I’ve been consistently working every night on the photographs, which is keeping me focused and getting me to feel much more productive.  I’m realizing more and more just how much work it is to get just the right photograph; every time I sit down to review the images, I get an “itch” that there’s something that could be done better.  It may feel easy to press the button on the camera, but I have to shoot so many photographs and sift through so many bad ones that the editing process can be quite time consuming. I’m now on round three of reshoots for several of the pieces. (and on each round, there are probably 4-5 sets of about 20 photographs, thank goodness for digital photography!) This time instead of focusing on lighting from below, I’m working on doing more close ups of the faces.  This way I can get rid of some of the redundant black space in the background, and make the foreheads seem smaller. When I show too much of the forehead it tends to make the faces look bald, which calls too much attention away from the face.

From below

I experimented last night and today with lighting these two faces from below. I’m still on the fence on whether I should “accept” the faces that are lit from below into this series, or whether it’s better to have all of them consistently from above. It’s hard because there is such a fine line between monotony and cohesiveness in a series, and aspects like these can be a tough call.

For now, I’m just making sure that I’m shooting each face from above and from below so that I can keep my options open until I’m ready to make a decision.  I find it’s always better to make too much work and then be able to edit it down later.  That way, I feel like I’ve covered all of my bases and don’t feel like I’ve missed out on any opportunities.  The worst feeling in the world is feeling a sense of regret in your work, that you will never know how things could have worked out because you didn’t take the time to try it out.

First face

I have been struggling over the past few days with photographing this face above. This face was the very first face that I sculpted in this series, and so from my point of view it lacks the kind of direction and confidence that I see in the later pieces.  This piece is also significantly larger than the other faces, which are about life size. The part of this face which was the most problematic was how dimensional and large the nose was, largely because this piece was sculpted as a full three-dimensional head, as opposed to as a relief like the other pieces. I took in consideration the profile views, whereas with the reliefs I’m doing now I only consider the front view. For this reason, the nose cast a significantly larger shadow than usual which obscured a lot of the lower section of the face.  I shot and reshot multiple times to make sure that the lower section of the face was at least somewhat illuminated.