Personal Investigation Essay

Personal Investigation Essay

In my art 3 Personal Investigation, I plan to follow a theme of 'mental health issues on LGBT+ people.' This topic is very personal to me as I am going to use it to find out why and the reasons behind statistics such as 'a member of the LGBT+ community is in grades 7-12 found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth were more than twice as likely than their heterosexual peers to have attempted suicide and were more likely to have completed suicide. Six times as likely to experience high levels of depression and eight times as likely to attempt suicide in their young adult years.' Being a part of the LGBT+ community myself and also have experienced problems with mental health in the past I want to explore this and create pieces of artwork to represent the feelings and thoughts I was having during this period of time in my life and describe it through the medium of art and hopefully making my final piece an installation and focusing specifically on the mediums of texture, colour and form.

Artist Name - Raymond Hains

Name of Piece - Affiches Dechirées (translates to 'torn posters')

Date Completed - 1949

Materials Used - Torn posters on iron sheets

Info found at - http://www.macba.cat/en/exhibition-raymond-hains

My first artist for my personal investigation is Raymond Hains. Hains was born in Saint-Brieuc, Côtes-du-Nord, France in 1926. He belonged to the group called the décollagistes or affichistes, which made a very significant contribution to the development of the French Nouveau Réalisme arising at the end of the 1950s. Hains's work explores the world through its underlying linguistic framework, applying himself to the freedom of destruction. Hains was a flâneur, a flâneur being a man who saunters around observing society and the urban derive was an essential method of work for him. The streets were his workshop, and they gave rise to the affiches déchirées (torn posters) that he began working on in 1949 with Jacques Villeglé, and in 1997 he was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize for his work. He later died on the 28th of October 2005 in Paris.

If I was to describe affiches déchirées to someone who can't see the piece, I feel I would have some difficulty describing it as because it is very abstract and there is no obvious known forms by looking at the piece so it'd be hard to describe it in detail. So to describe it I would tell the person that they are looking at a highly textured collage using old posters that have been stripped back so you can see plenty of layers and till you can't really see what any of the posters ever said. There is quite clearly a lot of thought that has gone into choosing these particular posters for the composition or colour or perhaps before the posters were stripped back to bare bones they had messages on that related to certain things the artists or the French politics or economy was going through at the time. This is what Hains was going for by producing a 'sui general' version of Informalism and offered his own ironic take on Abstract Expressionism, calling himself an "inaction painter" and this is why he chose and used posters found on the street so that the art couldn't have been anymore current to  that day and time and that is why he considered his 'workshop' the streets of France.

The formal elements used in this piece are tone and texture. The element of tone is used as there are different shades of the colours used in the piece. This is helped by the fact that the materials used in this piece are found materials of posters around France meaning that not one shade of colour will be exactly the same, meaning there is plenty of different tones throughout this piece. The other formal element used in this piece is texture and this texture is created in various different ways from not only the fact that there is multiple layers of posters but however from the fact they are stripped back allowing you to see all the layers but by doing this it will create many interesting marks and tones that wouldn't have been possible if this method hadn't been used. The fact that the formal elements of Line and form are missing are because Hains is an Abstract Expressionism artist meaning that his work would never have no clear form or line as then it wouldn't fit with the style of work he pioneered.

The composition of the piece is that there is 3 iron sheets and the posters have been stuck across multiple of the sheets so it feels like a coherent piece but they have been cut off at the end of the sheets of iron perhaps this is to symbolize a disconnect between two things perhaps there's a deeper hidden meaning such as there being a disconnect between society and something else. Another way it is composed is the focus is different in every sheet of iron perhaps this was done so you would look at the piece as a whole composition rather than focusing on one small area maybe it wants you to metaphorically look at 'the bigger picture' of this secret meaning?

I feel Hains created this piece because not only he wanted to explore and later on pioneer this style of Abstract Expressionism as Hains' work transgresses and explodes all of the established theories of contemporary art, but he also created this piece in collaboration with Jacques de la Villeglé, and while creating this work he was taking constant photographs so everything is photographed before it was torn up.

The elements I am going to be taking from Hains' work is his element of texture and collage. I want to take this element and stretch it and put personal touches into my work and deep back stories about some of the things I was thinking and feeling during my depression. I want to put all these layers of personal meaning into my work and then rip them away and create similar effects to what Hains has created. Almost as if to represent the fact that I never told anybody what I was thinking and feeling and I want to keep it a secret but I want to include them very subtlety in my work so that to find these messages you would have to be looking very hard and not just at one section of the piece you'd have to be looking at the piece as a whole. 

 Artist Name - Heather Benning

Name of Piece - The Dollhouse

Date Completed - March 23rd, 2013

Materials Used - Wood, plaster, paint, mixed media – existing abandoned house

Info found at - http://www.heatherbenning.ca/the-dollhouse.html

My second artist is Heather Benning. Benning was born on the 15th of May 1980. She is an installation artist and most of her work started off as quite small installations being one or two pieces to her biggest and most famous work 'The Dollhouse' pictured above being the largest and the piece I am going to take inspiration from. The house was located near Sinclair Manitoba on highway #2.  For over 18 months she re-shingled the roof with recycled shingles and restored and furnished the house to the era the house was abandoned.  She then removed the north-facing wall and replaced it with plexi-glass.  The house was officially opened to the public June 9th, 2007.  The house then stood tomb-like as a life-sized dollhouse for 6 years. In October of 2012 the house began to show its age, the foundation was compromised.  The house was only meant to stand as long as it remained safe.  In March of 2013 The Dollhouse met it's death with fire also pictured above.

To describe this piece to someone who can't see it I would have an easier job because there is a lot more figurative forms in this piece, so I'd simply describe it as a life-sized dollhouse that was fully refurnished to put it back to the condition that a family back in the 60's would've decorated it, it had a standard layout of a farmhouse back in the 60's with a living room, dining room, kitchen, 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom and these rooms were decorated according to their previous functions before the house was abandoned, it was then later destroyed by fire which was started by Benning herself. I feel there is a symbolic meaning behind why Benning had always planned that 'The Dollhouse' was going to be destroyed and after doing some research I found out that Benning's idea behind this piece was 'I wanted to show both the romantic nostalgia of that ideal and simultaneously show the reality. So I left the exterior of the house to appear as it was after 40 plus years of abandonment, with the interior looking as though the house was just left as it was. The idea was to show this romantic ideal of what a lovely life it was in that lovely little house, but then to bring the viewer into the real - it wasn't that lovely, the house became abandoned, no one lived in it ever again.'

The formal elements used in this piece are form and texture. The element of form is the fact that it is a 3D installation and one of the house which is very unusual to see in art just because of the pure scale of the project. The composition of this piece I feel is quite important as well as only one side of the house was removed all the designs of the rooms and the layouts would've had to have been planned to work with this so you could see the full extent of the piece from that side of the house. Another thing that Benning would've had to consider is the actual decoration inside making sure that all the colours of the furniture and inside itself went together and looked pleasant and matched the era of the 60's of when this house was abandoned. The other formal element used in this piece is texture, texture is used on the walls itself with the wall paper, the carpet and wooden flooring, it's used on the various pieces of furniture decorating the house, the whole piece has many different textures which are part of everyday normal life and I feel this was done to really pull through this message that the inside of this house was to be the idealistic house back in the 60's but you'd never know until you looked round the back of the house as by judging the house by its front which had been left the way it had looked after 40 years of abandonment, I feel this itself also has a part on the meaning of the piece.

I feel Benning created this piece because not only did she want to up the scale of her previous installation work, but also to perceive the message of that nothing is as what it seems on the outside rather than the inside which is why she left the exterior of the farmhouse untouched and only refurbished the inside to what it would've looked like before it was abandoned in the 60's. I feel this message is going to play a role in my work for my personal investigation this year as it can relate heavily to the theme of 'mental illnesses' that I have chosen to create my project around.

The elements I am going to be taking from Benning's work is the fact that she is an installation artist, and I prefer working on bigger scales and I want to use larger compositions and pieces to replicate the feeling of being overwhelmed by everything that you get when you suffer with depression and I want these big pieces to make a really big statement but almost have a slight subtlety to them as almost as if they could blend into the background similar again to the feeling I had most of the way through my depression of not wanting to pester anyone with my problems as I felt irrelevant and that my problems were things that I had to deal with myself.  

Artist Name - Tadeusz Machowski

Name of Piece - N/A

Date Completed - N/A

Materials Used - Mixed Media

Info found at - http://www.abstractartistgallery.org/tadeusz-machowski/

My third artist for my art 3 personal investigation is Tadeusz Machowski. Tadeusz Machowski was born in 1955 in Lancut, Poland. Since his early childhood, his main passion was all kinds of art. He has been developing his talent by creating realistic landscapes for about twenty years. Then, inspired by early twentieth century art, Tadeusz started looking for some other kinds of depicting reality and expressing emotions. Drawing inspiration from artists that had been created between 1940 and 1960, he started to work on his own abstract style.

To describe this piece to someone who can't see it I'd start off by saying that the background looks as if it was created by paint being dragged in swift motion and then almost as if it has been washed away in certain areas to built up the ideas of layers all the different tones running throughout this piece. I really like the way the paint is applied as it reminds me of almost hallucinogenic colours, and I feel if I was to add colours to my pieces due to my theme narrowing me down on colour choices due to it being quite dark I would have to add the colours in a similar technique to this in order to keep that subtlety by still have the hints of colour. I would then also further describe it by saying that there is occasional paint drips every now and again and these paint drips seem to be colours that are the complementary colours to what colour the background is and this only emphasises the effect created by all these layers of paint.

The formal elements used in this piece are tone and colour. Colour is used in this piece not only in the layers of colour to create what I feel is quite a hallucinogenic piece all together making you want to keep looking at it this is again helped by the paint splats that are complementary colours to what colour is on the background behind it, always drawing your focus towards the centre of the piece. The element of tone is used by just looking at the amount of different shades of each colour is on the piece reinforcing the almost hallucinogenic vibe I get from this piece of work and I want to create almost the same effect in my work later on down the line.

This piece of artwork is composed with the focus being in the middle of the piece where most of the paint splatter and layers of paint and all the different tones and shades are with the further out of the centre of the piece you get there being less colour and layers of paint and it becomes more washed out and almost like it has been blurred. This piece I feel is very hallucinogenic because with the centre of the piece being in the middle and there being so much to look at you could easily star at this piece for ages and just get lost in it even though on the surface it seems quite a simple piece and I want to replicate this sort of simplicity in my work but as you look at it closer you start to break down barriers and discover the very deep and personal meaning behind my pieces of work and the project as a whole.  

After researching about Machowski I discovered that his reasoning behind these pieces is 'Tadeusz finds inspiration from abstract expressionism of the mid 1940’s. The art movement had an immeasurable influence on the many varieties of work that followed it, especially in the way its artists used colour and materials. Machowski's works hope to capture some of the energy and excitement of the movement, yet strive to reflect his own sense and vision of reality within a contemporary context.' I feel he means this by he really wanted to experiment with his new found love for creating expressive artwork, but also wanted to show how excited the whole art community was about these new found styles of art and new ways to experiment with old materials in completely new ways.

The elements I am going to be taking from Machowski's work is his use of colour and also the way he applies this colour to create this hallucinogenic effect that I feel this piece creates as I want to bring this way of applying paint and adding it to my knowledge of texture and creating some very bizarre and thought provoking pieces as I really want people to question what my topic is about and allow people to come up with their own ideas and interpretations of my work. I also want to do this because it's something I'm still not greatly confident about talking about so I want to mimic this by not disclosing what my theme of my work is until people actually see it and ask me what it is about.