History Of Modern and Contemporary Art Reflection Post

 

 

 

I relate to Michael Quanne’s work because most of my work revolves around themes of discomfort that people feel in the physical and mental spaces that they inhabit. I am extremely interested in how this sense of discomfort can be expressed or evoked. While my childhood was nowhere near as difficult as his, I would never want to go back to being a child, and relate to his sense of dread towards it. I am also interested in how backgrounds or world in which character or protagonists, in illustrations or comics are set, can be manipulated to add to the narration of the story. Michael Quanne uses suffocating and impossible planes to rest his subjects on, and skews the perspectives of the world they inhabit to convey their internal discomfort. It tells you about not only the world his protagonist, the little boy inhabits but also the people who he exists with, who shape his experiences, his opinion of himself, the situations he faces. This is something I have been trying to employ into my own work. I usually lose a tremendous amount of drama that could potentially uplift my work if I found a way to focus not only on my protagonist but also the background. I get so caught up in crafting the details of my subject that I end up neglecting my surroundings making them a solid black, or not giving them enough space in the composition, which robs it of the full effect it can have.  Michael Quanne’s work has been one of my greatest inspirations.

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Michael Quanne’s The Sea,( 1941) (extreme right)

My works, Sleep (2015) and The Chip Factory (2016) are both heavily inspired by the sensibility with which Michael Quanne constructed his interior spaces, and present an  exaggerated version of his already skewed and impossible perspectives. I use space to attribute to my characters a similar sense of loneliness, gloom and a sense of worthless, insignificance that they feel.  I love how he positions characters in his spaces and manipulates their sizes to effectively show how in control they are of the narrative.

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