Medium Specificity

I noticed how painting is often used as a metaphor. For example, how familiar do these lines sound: “The stars were painted across the sky.” or “The words painted thoughts in her mind.” So how is it that painting, which is traditionally thought of as a specific medium, can be understood figuratively in such a way? With this in mind, I formed my understanding of painting that I would build my work off of. In Understanding Comics, the author is able to explore a medium by narrowly defining that medium. Instead, I found it to my advantage to broadly define my medium.

Painting: v. To apply a medium onto a surface.

My idea started as such: take a single image and put it under as many different forms of painting as I could, without ever using actual paint. For the subject, I decided to use a bit of cardboard that I have had for two years and used as a painting palette. It has years of mixed paint, doodles, and basically is the incubator for many of my own artwork I’ve created over the years. First, I took a photograph of the subject. (Medium: Surface :: Light: Sensor) Then, I uploaded the picture and digitally painted on it in the appropriately titled Microsoft Paint. (Medium: Surface :: Digital Paint: Digital Surface) I then printed the image (Medium:Surface :: Printer Ink: Printer Paper) and painted on it with fingernail polish. I chose fingernail polish since it’s a form of painting that is closer to the more traditional form of painting, but isn’t thought of as such. I then transfered the fingernail polish painting, which was inspired by and closely followed the printed image, onto a blank sheet of paper and drew on that. Finally, I weaved the two paintings together and scanned the final product onto a computer. The final three dimensions are: film, the color grading (I took out all the green midtones to “paint” the film a magenta color, which evokes a sense of creativity to me) and editing, and finally the sound.

The sound was a particularly interesting element for me because originally I was planning to compose a song with whatever my subject was, so basically the idea of using the subject as a tool of painting. Instead, I decided to use natural sound from the entire film process to compose an organic soundtrack which presents themes of artistic process, filmmaking, collaboration, and of course, my original definition of painting.  

What my work exhibits is the deep dimensions in which painting can explores, but also a process of painting in general. My final film is a painting of the process of painting. (With the added obstruction of not using any paint.) It pushes the boundaries of what “paint” is. Can painting be painting without a specific pigment? I’d say painting is maybe the only medium that has this kind of versatility and I wanted to explore that. And I could have gone beyond 12 dimensions. I painted with light, voices, props, and even my body. Many artists paint in a similar way-- using material other than paint to create a painting.

Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic artist who frequently paints with light in his work as shown in the photograph below. His experiments with light and color influenced particular elements in my piece, including the use of magenta in editing and use of a disco ball to light the scene where I collage.

Historical Script

Artists' Statement 

In Satrapi’s The Veil, Satrapi is forced to wear a veil she is not used to as her country as her government seeks to establish a new order. For Satrapi, so much of her history – of her country’s Cultural Revolution – is of veils, of hiding behind things. Satrapi dons a veil and dons another figurative one as she pretends to want to be a doctor, not a prophet; her mother must disguise herself to avoid trouble.

Meike and Angela hide behind a variety of veils during their own revolution: the Iconoclastic Fury, or Beeldenstorm. Entoen.nu, a website developed by the Committee on Development of the Dutch Canon and managed by Hubert Slings of the Dutch Open Air Museum, speaks of the Netherlands’ own cultural revolution. “The Calvinists [a branch of Protestantism] believed the [Catholic] Church had to be purified of “papist superstitions”. By…smashing images of saints, they aimed to rid these Catholic symbols of their mystical value and make clear that Catholicism had been twisted into a sacrilegious puppet show of the true faith…the Calvinists believed they were restoring ties with the earlier, in their eyes more pure, Christians.”

            Meike and Angela’s involvement in Beeldenstorm forces them to hide under cover of night and hold secretive church services in their home. Even in Meike’s coffee shop, Angela first hides in a cloud of smoke. Like Satrapi’s mother and sometimes even Satrapi herself, Meike and Angela are liberal, independent women who fight for freedom. In Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, Russell Shorto defines liberalism: “Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air.”

            Meike and Angela, then, are two liberal women in a world slowly changing, a world of idols and smashing them. They come to live forever by saving the painting of the Virgin Mary, an act symbolic of true liberalism and representative of the colliding chaos of their time. In the present day, they remain the same kind of women. Meike owns a coffee shop named Gedogen, a Dutch term which translates to “technically illegal but officially tolerated”. The painting of Mary hangs on the wall, remembering a different side of the past, next to the landscapes that represent the sea of change that came out of Beeldenstorm.

            In the script, art heavily affects ideology, but in the writing of the script, ideology heavily influenced art. Reading Shorto’s book is what inspired the script in the first place, and it was important that Meike and Angela embraced the liberalism that so characterizes their city. The sources helped us understand the importance of art, and so we applied that to the script to symbolize the complexities of the two situations and times. The result is art that hopes to convey not just a story, but a time, a city, and an idea.

Process Piece

Future Library

The beauty of a process piece is the focus on creation, and at our core that is what sets humans apart from other living creatures on earth. What’s so wonderful about documenting a creation process, whether it is through the medium of film or through sound alone, is a compound effect. One creative piece inspires another and the potency of that creative process is given room to grow, much like a tree in the forest. This idea is evident in the short documentary, “The Smokehouse”. With each appropriately composed shot of the wood as he carved, we were watching a communication between two artistic works. The first being that of the woodwork and the second being the medium of film. This collaboration of artistic mediums illustrates a macro-process, similar to our audio documentation of “Future Library,” in which two processes compound and communicate. As art begins to communicate with art, it has a better chance to influence the people who come in contact with it and in doing so it has a better chance to stand the test of time. This idea of artistic communication and time is something that we wanted to portray as we started on this work.

The idea of Future Library is timeless, growing like tree roots into the past, rooted in the future, and growing upwards towards the future. The link between a tree and a book and man is as old as the written word itself, leading up to the moment where we are always faithfully writing books for a near-future audience, but now we are looking further into the future. Future Library will contain books that will not be read for a century, and authors such as Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell who are contributing to the project must faithfully write for an audience that may not even exist.

Rachel first stumbled upon the idea of “Future Library” as she was scouring a artistic journal publication for ideas. The idea stood out to her because it seemed like a simple time capsule, but it was actually complex: filled with questions and implications about the future of humanity, libraries, forests, and books. The artist, Katie Paterson, believes that these things are interconnected. She got the idea for Future Library when she thoughtfully compared tree rings to chapters of a book. We particularly liked the idea of trees growing as a book was growing, since their fate is interconnected. We wanted to reflect that in our process piece by juxtaposing the forest sounds with typewriting. We also decided that since the idea behind this process holds equal weight to the process itself, we wanted to avoid following a strictly linear path. We introduce the process piece with a quote from Fahrenheit 451, a book all too appropriate for this project. This introduces our theme, then we introduce our forest, a steady presence throughout the piece. The forest is the only component of this process that will be present in an interactable way in our lifetime, so we kept it throughout. We also thought forests and libraries to be very similar, so we juxtaposed them in the beginning with the audio of turning pages and stacking books.

Finally, we wanted to end the project with the theme of the unknown future. We included a clip of a news reel with no real news to introduce the idea of a century where anything could happen. Then, we end with a quote from T.S. Eliot: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”