- Your two ‘influences’ and a breakdown of research you compiled on each
Alice Neel
- was one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. She was also a pioneer among women artists. A painter of people, landscape and still life, Neel was never fashionable or in step with avant-garde movements. Sympathetic to the expressionist spirit of northern Europe and Scandinavia and to the darker arts of Spanish painting, she painted in a style and with an approach distinctively her own.
Wolfgang Tillmans
- Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.
- Anything interesting / unexpected / difficult that you encountered during your research / making process
- I found it a little difficult to replicate Wolfgang’s snapshot style like still life photography despite it seeming like it would not be difficult to.
- Your concept for your final collaborative piece — how you conceived that the ‘influences’ would be in conversation? How did the research guide you to the final art object? How did you consider presentation / material in the work?
- Me and my partner aimed to combine Alice Neels traditional paint portraits with Tillmans snapshot still life photography and his weird approach toward portraiture in his photography. We wanted them to be photographs that I took that were in the style of Tillmans accompanied by paintings by Madeleine in the iconic style of Alice Neel.
- Something you feel was successful about the piece
- I think for the most part we were able to execute the concept successfully but aesthetically I feel the presentation could be much better.
- Something that you would have liked to do differently or to expand on in a future iteration of the project (theoretically)
- I would like to work more with still lifes and would like to expand on that more in the future.
- Explain the process and experience of collaboration with your partner. — How did you divide your time? Was the process easy? Fun? Frustrating?
- We decided to divide and conquer. I would focus on taking the photos and would send them to Madeleine where she would paint a subject into the photos.
