DIPLOMA IN FOUNDATION STUDIES (ART AND DESIGN) STATEMENT OF INTENT 1. NAME: Torin Karidi 2. CANDIDATE NUMBER: 3. WORKING PROJECT TITLE: The quality of tension 4. PROJECT AREA: Mixed media, pastel chalk drawings.
Section 1 PROGRESS AND ACHIEVEMENT THROUGH UNITS 1-7 I have discovered new materials and how to use them, paint and clay are handled with more precision and efficiency than before, and new tricks have been discovered through experimentation. The subject is observed more deeply and with more attention to placement and qualities.
Before the course I used to photograph things out of admiration and sentiment, whereas now I see things differently, observing angles, light and other factors to increase the potential for an interesting photograph. In drawing and painting, perspective and sense of proportion has improved, with a more methodical system.
Previously, when I looked at other artists’ work I was focused mainly on, for example: aesthetics, colours and shading. I have learned new things to consider, paying more attention to composition, style, meaning and technique as well. Section 2 PATHWAY CHOICES
In the Pathway, Fine Art was the best choice for me because it will give the widest spectrum / range of possibilities. Many artists spend time at Mystica’s art studio during the week and the works - of multiple mediums and materials - are diverse, with such different styles: seeing the wide range of creative outcomes inspires to pursue the least restricted path. Mixed media was the most enjoyable because of the freedom, combining photography and mixed media (the bottle series), and knowing installations and otherwise miscellaneous ideas could still be presented. The process involved all kinds of challenges (like wind and water). Also it was interesting to see the movement......like the umbrella with flowers floating on the water and trying to capture the right moment, when everything was placed in the camera frame exactly as planned.
Section 3 FINAL MAJOR PROJECT AIMS AND REALISATION The quality of tension. I live on the beautiful island of Mauritius and am inspired by the power and forces within our natural surroundings, like the sea, cyclones and vegetation. After experiencing a few cyclones and tropical storms, I decided to explore tension in my work. Most of the drawings will be done with chalk pastels on big black and brown papers. The works will be divided into abstract and realism. The whole objective is a quality of tension so in the abstract drawings the actual object will be less defined and obvious, though still relevant. In Realism, on the other hand, the drawings will have a more immediate and clear visual resemblance to the real life object. Images to draw from will range from nature: banana leaves, dragonfly to manmade and physically arranged: Hanging chair, swing, knotted ropes. The focus will stay on three or four objects to explore different situations of tension, with multiple versions. These images will be explored on paper with chalk pastels and a dynamic installation. Through all the different ways to convey it, tension is the aim and theme, to always be noticed and considered.
I want to create something that is a real reflection somehow........using direction, light and dark, definition, warm and cold, near or far, showing qualities like heaviness or lightness, depth etc. These are real things that appear in nature. The result should be more objective and less about me, more about the way the cosmos works than about my feelings living inside it.
Section 4 EVALUATION
I will evaluate my work once completed and try to exhibit it in an interesting way. I will see if the intended goal was actually accomplished and what other discoveries or ‘unexpected’ things happened on the journey. I will try to critique the work and look at my strong points and weak points and how to improve the techniques and ideas.
Tension According to the Webster dictionary, tension is described as follows:
‘The act or action of stretching or the condition or degree of being stretched to stiffness’. The opposite of tension is compression. The lack of tension is slackness. Tension is seen in many places, natural and manmade. The surface of water - the meniscus - has a lot of tension which can be seen when you gently touch the surface of water and feel the resistance. In the artistic sense, tension can be described as the balance maintained between opposing forces or elements. It is used a lot in design for aesthetics and in artists’ installations. Many of Anish Kapoor’s sculptures display tension as a sureness of direction and Henry Moore’s 1951 Reclining Figure has a tension in it’s lines that helped in large part to achieve a distinct leaning quality.
Anish Kapoor
Henry Moore’s 1951 Reclining figure
The Golden Gate bridge has a lot of tension in the cables.
The tension in a branch of a tree, holding onto its fruits, can be seen clearly. The leaves are also a good example and will be the main object in some of my drawings.
This project is about observing and understanding the quality of tension and different ways in which to convey it. The adventure goes through many versions, as this is a continuous process of explorative searching. There is always something more to learn, another version to create. Every version is as relevant as another, process and results are equally important. This study of a quality with many versions is inspired by Cezanne (fruits), Turner (seascapes), Van Gogh (sunflowers) and other early modern art. Many artists today work with versions or series, based on a theme or concept. Paul Cezanne created many still life paintings, mainly of fruits, in different arrangements and places. Rather than it all being about the object, he used the fruits as a tool, a theme, to help him in the search and study of a specific quality. “Throughout his life he struggled to develop an authentic observation of the seen world by the most accurate method of representing it in paint that he could find.� Wiki
Four Apples
Still life with a peach and two green pears. 1888-87
Still Life 1895
I found a beautiful image of a dragonfly holding on to a stick while being pushed by raindrops. In the picture there is an unmistakable feel of tense opposing forces. It gave me the idea to explore tension as a quality and the dragonfly was my first drawing.
Chalk pastels is my favorite medium and the main one in this project. It is more direct than paint, without a brush between me and the page so I feel more in control and really am more adept with chalks than with paint. I experiment and learn tricks, using various tools and my fingers to make different textures.
Dragonfly
Black textured paper _dimensions The dragonfly is black so I simply left it’s shape on the page uncolored. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the lines in the wings are hexagonal. I achieved the transparency in the wings but could have done the rain more accurately. More and longer drops. Also noted for next time, the tail can be longer and the wings a bit further forward, though in this case it worked out well to show the tension of being pushed.
Dragonfly at Night
This time I tried to incorporate another object into the picture and put them in a bigger space. For the window to look like a window, I added a shutter. The dragonfly, halfway in the window, is colored inside the window and grey and white outside it. Incidentally, I see a stronger pull of direction in the shutter than in the dragonfly. A new trick I learned was to apply a thick line of chalk to cardboard along the edge and smudge it off with my fingers, always in the same direction. I can add another color over it, with a shorter sweep. This is a more poetic version than the rest of my works.
Color Swing 1
Color Swing 2
Black and White Swing 2
A good example of tension from pull is a swing. I drew a swing and the corner of a shade cloth tied to the roof with a pipe. In the swing series I was very focused on showing the tension in the ropes and shade so I drew only the necessary, keeping it more simple and minimalistic than the first dragonfly. Along with tension, my other objective is to have a dynamic composition, for which I use color very carefully. I can achieve my aim with black and white but it seemed harder to me before I started. When there are colors in my drawings I use hot, cold, neutral, black, white and gray. With only black and white I have‌ black, white and grey. I must start with the lightest shades of grey. I use black for definitions, touches, and to draw attention to the right places. White is also strong - on brown or black paper - and is used similarly.
Floating Chair
I thought I should do a few more suspended / floating inanimate objects so I hung a chair from the ceiling. In one stage, while drawing the chair I needed to show two surfaces next to each other, using different shades to show that they are separate parts. But if I used a different gray, it’d look like part of another surface. With five surfaces close together, it seemed as if I had run out of shades! I continued the lines of the chair beyond the object’s edges, to the end of the page. The lines are shooting through the chair, the tension perceived with quality alone. It’s an interesting achievement because the tension in the lines is there, but without an obvious story to explain why, if at all, they should posses this quality. With the dragonfly, the tension felt in the flying rain is backed and strengthened by prior knowledge and experience. But in these lines the tension you perceive is from the use of colors, direction and composition, creating a quality without a story behind it. Imagine an image of an unidentified shape, and without knowing what material it’s made of or what it’s doing, you know it’s heavy. To generate that conclusion within the viewers is quite a challenge, I think.
Hanging Chair
On black paper. The chair was positioned so it would have a movement going down-left or right-up. When I drew the directions they were all straight, there wasn’t really something tight that stood out. So I used the effect from Dragonfly in the Night - this time with torn edges - to soften the lines, provide a cool background and create more contrast. Among colors and directions, the two white lines connected to the chair give a pretty strong impression of a slingshot: the chair is going to snap up at any moment but it’s being held back. The chair is minimalistic, only lines, to avoid distraction from the main message I’m trying to Convey, movement, pull, stretch… The black paper makes the colors stronger than white paper does, and the smudge trick provides more motion than smooth application. I overlaid some colors, for example with the green: I extended it as far as I could and the white over it a shorter distance.
Chair, Ropes
I again tried to increase tension through contrast, drawing, side by side, a slack rope and a taut one. All of the chair was done using the Smudge to make it more loose then the rope. The angle of the chair, with the straight rope placed as it was, worked very well to show how the chair is being held up. Understanding how to draw the rope actually took some observation from different angles, of how it’s wound 3D, and some practice. The knots were complicated of course, but fun to do and satisfying to finish. For the chair seat I accidentally discovered how to produce a texture just like the real thing. Except that in the drawing it’s concave instead of cushion. This actually makes the chair look older than it is. I scrape the chalk on a palette knife edge to make powder, which falls on the seat, and I smudge it in one direction.
Cornelia Parker, a sculptor and installation artist, is best known her large scale installations such as Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991). She froze the scene of an explosion midway, in that moment where everything pulls outwards. The many pieces of a garden shed are suspended with a light in the middle, casting shadows on the walls. The shadows seem to be moving more than the actual pieces. Because of a story involving tension, told with hanging objects, it can be compared to the hanging chair drawings. The difference is that the garden shed’s tension is about a sudden fast explosion while the chair is still. But then, tension is all about opposing forces or something moving in a definite line, pulled tight. There is dynamic in that so how different really is the chair? The falling motion is being prevented, a continuous act of pulling. Again, like a slingshot. But in reverse. When a pot sits on the earth it’s fighting nothing. Conversely, the chair is reaching down, which impresses the idea of consistent strain. Why do the shadows seem to move more than the actual objects? Because they are warped, stretched and curved. This further enhances the quality and is noted for future abstract drawings, to express movement.
Banana leaves have a lot of tension in the neat clean line of it’s center vein. Actually ‘neat clean line’ is how I’d describe a graceful dancer. Anyway, the banana leaves pose the fun challenge of trying to get the right color and getting the lines close or far, light or dark enough. The blue lines are perpendicular rather than parallel to the leaf to lend strength to the direction rather than drown it.
The stalk is one of the parts with the most tension so I approached it in this drawing. For the stalks, to get the right color I used olive green, on it bright green and on that white. Smudge it all together and I get something pretty close. Mixing colors with chalks takes a lit of trial, error and memorizing. I should record different combinations in a notebook. The leaves are also Smudged and for the underside I used dark green, grey and white.
The underside of the banana leaf is a lighter green. In this drawing, some people have commented, the leaf seems more translucent. As with all the previous banana leaves, I Smudged, cutting the cardboard to the curve of the center line, positioning it along the edge and swiping the color all the way out to the end of the leaf. On the leaf’s edges I drew a line and smudged it inward. The thin veins were enough to leave in pencil, without making them thicker in chalk, which I think would be too strong to go with the more delicate leaf.
In my research and viewing of many different illustrations of banana leaves, I noticed that people focus more on the texture and shape of the leaf more than on it’s pulling quality.
Banana leaf, swing
A banana leaf with the swing - two different entities together, was a great way to compare and observe the different causes and situations of tension. Created from pulling forces, it can result in an object both static and reaching, like the chair. Pressure, which is a similar quality, often generates tension. The rope was drawn with and ink pen and this time the veins of the banana leaf have a lot more presence. The leaf is this time is based on illustrations as well as the real thing outside. A scene from the film House of Flying Daggers, full of tension in many ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nmfwQdkeM
Swiss photographer and artist Fabian Oefner captures and experiments with natural phenomena that happen daily, like bubbles, flames, and exploding balloons covered with paint. I found this artist after the slingshot experiment. I love his interesting investigations because of the attention given to the little beautiful things that so often go unnoticed. “Stop for a moment and appreciate the magic that constantly surrounds us�, he says.
The Slingshot
The slingshot idea came from the dragonfly. I wanted to take a concept or image and incorporate it into another work. The stones shooting at the cloth, with their small impacts, are like the rain. The cloth is like the dragonfly, hanging on and being hit by mini projectiles. The stones are shot together with pigment powders used in the Hindu festival, Holi. The colored powder is perfect for this experiment, moving just the way I want it to. At first the slingshot was going to be stretched between two poles or trees, with the sheet in front of it also stretched between two more poles / trees. There was a much simpler and more fitting setup though, so an easel was used to make the slingshot. The sheet was stretched between two pillars on the veranda. I sprayed the cloth with water so the powder would stay. In the end stones weren’t necessary because the powder hit the cloth hard enough.
The Powderpult!
Why not make a catapult too? I got help from my family, using what we could find in the studio (recycled materials). We invited someone to participate. She would pour some powder into the container and I stand in front of it, wearing a white shirt and getting pelted with flying colors. I also got sprayed lightly with water, on the face, hair, legs, feet‌ The wind kept starting and stopping so at times the shot was perfect and other times the powder missed completely, having been blown to one side or the other. It was quite fun, except when I got powder in my teeth‌ see results in outcomes.