Object Painting
I took the oil painting home to build on because I felt the original wasn't exploring tone effectively. I found it difficult to capture all the different tones, and had simplified the shape into sections of colours. Instead of putting much thought into how the structure would relate to the background, I simply used a dark tone overall to make the lighter form stand out. However, the second time I came back to it, I tried to do something more interesting - tried to soften the edges of the object by applying some white to the background on its right. I forgot to take a photo of how it was before, to compare, but basically it was very stylised - too stylised - I think. It was more or less just chunks of colour without any sense of smoothness/merging of the tones. I am a bit more pleased with it now that I have built on top of it, but I can't bring myself to finish it off completely.. I am contemplative over the very bottom - where the object rests. I want to leave it as it seems to give the image a more three-dimensional feel, but to others it may just seem unresolved.
This task especially agrees with the idea in John Berger's essay, that you can only capture your own 'forseen ideal moment' when the object being looked at is always changing, in the sense that paintings of the same thing still end up turning out completely dissimilar to one another, due to the alternating perspectives. It was interesting to see how different everyone's was.
Scanned photos of the structure we did the oil paintings on.
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