Journal 2

The thing that struck me the most was the way Ball idolized Da Vinci for his ability to represent the path of water in two dimensions and have the water display such liquid properties on canvas and then in three dimensions when he took his findings and braided women’s' hair. His studious attention to detail and the integrity he maintained towards the subject matter leaves me in awe. I'm entirely ready to agree with Ball on this one.

I seek to represent something in the form of something else, I'm following a process in order to stylize the concept I'm creating it from. I should be so lucky if i manage to hold onto the entire integrity of my project and still come up with something half as aesthetically pleasing as Da Vinci.

Because while pictures and merchandise of animals, toy dolls, holiday spots and/or strange fetishes are cute and quirky they're also tacky, often cheap and easy to reproduce on a large scale and end up in landfill somewhere down the line. I seek to avoid making something tacky or temporary wherever possible. Taking lessons from nature and defining them - breaking them down into stigmas and visual representations of those stigmas is harder than it looks.

The beauty of this article is that it reminds us not to lose sight of our initial motives. We have a concept in my case Petrified wood. I've identified compression, tetrahedrons, coils, negative space, and light as part of my visual representations to identify permineralisation, the environment it occurs in, the decay of the organic material, the remnants of organic matter long after it has decayed and the decay of the isotopes that help us measure it; and finally, the minerals that replace the organic matter over time in my idea for a natural process. Da Vinci, as Ball points out; conducted experiments, observed, took notes and recreated the results in alternate mediums such as hair or oil on canvas. His studious approach shows me that I'm approaching my task with the same open mindedness and reinforces the way i develop designs. Our imagination holds many miraculous concepts however free thinking and unbound imaginations are often considered too dangerous.

To draw this back to the title - Impressionistic realism is to me the act of re-creating/re-representing existing patterns that already exist and applying those concepts to a different environment - one that doesn’t exist naturally. That way, we don’t lose sight of the idea but the way in which we represent this idea becomes more intuitive and personal. It allows us to think and interpret for ourselves and Da Vinci's example is all the excuse I need to let my imagination soar.