In the next few months, I’ll be working on a series of work based on my residency at Space on Ryder Farm. Before I start it, I’m doing a bunch of media experiments to figure out what direction I want to go in for the pieces. I took a trip to Iceland a few years ago and have a ton of pictures, so I decided to use that as a base to experiment around. While the scenery is different between there and here, a lot of the content will be similar - older buildings, natural settings, and farm animals.
I’ve always been obsessed with memory, nostalgia, and the importance of place in our lives. I find it interesting that we can have an experience in a specific place and take photos of it (or observational sketches) and even so, over time, our perception of that places changes. Every time we revisit a memory - especially when telling a story about it to others - tiny details change without us even realizing it. Why is that? Personally, I think every time we remember something, we’re changing little details to make the experience fit what we felt at that time. And in a sense, that actually makes our memory of that time, place, or event even more truthful than the reality. I think that’s why people who experience the same thing can have drastically different memories of what happened. We all see things through a different lens.
In these experiments, I’m applying that idea directly to the technique and materials I’m using and fusing reality and my memories of that time into one piece. Of course, most art that is based on a real place or time is essentially doing that already - artists can’t help but infuse their experience onto reality. However, I’m interested in what it looks like to make that mental process visible. Photographs stand in for the ‘reality of the place’ and then paint, being an expressive medium, are a stand in for memory and experience.
PROCESS
Above are the photos I’ve based the three paintings in this post on. I bring the photo into Photoshop and turn it into a black and white image. I then flip it so it’s backwards and print it out on a laser printer. On my final paper, I put matte medium down, flip the image facedown on the paper and adhere it. Then I brush water over the paper and peel the paper away. What is left is a transferred image! I intentionally don’t transfer it super well, so some parts will be clear and most parts will just be an interesting texture.
After that, I paint on top of it - I obscure some areas, let some parts peek through, draw over an area and change it completely, or add details that didn’t exist in the photo. The result is a painting that to me, feels more authentic to the experience I had than the photo I took.
I’m sure I’ll be talking more about this process and the idea behind it in the future, but if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments section!
It’s fall!!! Get out there and make some memories.
♡ nicole