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Initial Inspiration
- sampearson257
- Apr 25, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 8, 2024
I have multiple lines of inspiration inquiry, including artists, illustrators, and designers working in different materials. Below I elaborate further from my sketchbook.
Terry Hoff
Hoff creates paintings that express the energetic and fast-paced world we live in, portraying "oddly familiar" imagery that float within loud, crowded, and physically confusing spaces.
'Mariposa' was a 2019 exhibition in Los Angeles. His work embodies the feelings of overstimulation, and living in the rich and pop culture-heavy, western world. Within each form are layers of visual stimuli: Colours, shapes, textures, and patterns, and beneath these lie human forms, such as eyes. Hoff expresses our suffocation of information, media, and technology, and us getting lost in all the 'noise'.
Words come to mind such as over-stimulation, TV static, and brain neurons. Hoff successfully creates an image that the mind has not seen before, but attempts to relate to other references. I love the irregular shape, rounded edges, and blended colours (I assume airbrush), giving the illusion that it is digitally made, and not touched by hands. It also feels like it's alive, like a beating heart, or animated like ice cream melting in the sun.
Take-aways
Think about creating digital representations of the landscape.
Creating a sculpture, or an object that has never been seen before. Looks otherworldly. I like this juxtaposition between the familiar and unfamilar. Perhaps bring these elements into my own work.
Przemek Blejzyk
Blejzyk is a Polish artist who studies the mechanisms of nature and landscape, creating "multi-element compositions seeking a new way of representing reality in visual arts." (Sainer, 2024, https://www.sainer.org/bio)
"Although Przemysław Blejzyk decided to delineate his own path of formal searches, he is strongly inspired by the achievements of Polish colourists and master landscapists. He processes them creatively, taking into account the way in which we contemporarily consume visual messages – fast, among a barrage of stimuli and images. He puts together different formal languages, constructs multistage compositions, experiments with colour, and searches for relations between painting and music."
Urban Spree, 2023 (https://www.urbanspree.com/blog-container/sainer-opens-sainer-kol∞r-at-the-national-museum-in-gdańsk.html)
I love his unique take on landscape, where you can see visual elements of digital, cut-and-paste aesthetics. They appear like comic strips, representing the movement of time, and how the landscape changes with the light. His forms are reduced down to their essence, which captures the feeling of the world around them, and the experience of their lived spaces. Together, the forms create this feeling. Whilst separate, they are merely an abstract shape or colour.
His use of pixelated lines harshly cuts into the painting like TV static, or a glitch in the system. It reminds of the transitions between images, or video. Perhaps reflective of the different times in the day? If you look at 'UNTITLED LANDSCAPES 3', The arched curves take on the form of hills, and the multiple circles crowding the top-left suggest the animated movement of the sun or moon in the sky. It reminds us we are living in a digital world where images aren't necessarily real, and a literal boundary between his painted landscape and the majority pixels, reflects the connections between real and fake.
Take-away
Look at digital aesthetics, as being inspired by video games and creating open-world landscapes.
Think about comic strips, and painting more than one scene on the canvas? What do I wish to convey? The essence of time, movement, or the feeling of one moment maybe?
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