Personal Investigation. A2 level. Fine Art. 2012.

For an A2 level course that will finish in 2012, students at William de Ferrers School have to do a Personal Investigation (coursework). This has to include a related Personal Study (1,000 to 3,000 words).

The following titles were starting points for their work:

Abandoned and foresaken

Ken Currie "... consistently concerns himself with those individuals who are victims of social injustice. His paintings have focused upon the abandoned and forsaken in a rapidly changing world. Yet just as significantly, he meditates on the subject of existence in order to construct some idea of meaningful life."

(‘Ken Currie: Details Of A Journey.’ by Tom Normand. London. 2002.)

• A Man is a Man Ken Currie 2008.
• Portrait of John MacLean Ken Currie 1987.
• Dancing Couples Ken Currie 1992.
• Room with Two Windows Ken Currie 2004.

Absence and presence

"When you start working everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there." (John Cage, as recalled by Phillip Guston).

Edward Hopper's work has inspired generations of film makers, photographers, writers and artists including Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, Todd Haynes, William Boyd, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Ed Ruscha, Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans.

Victor Burgin writes: "... there is a real sense in which the work of Edward Hopper constitutes a world parallel to our own: a latent presence in the interstices of the present.

We need not look for Hopper in order to find him. We may encounter him by chance at random places where his world intersects our own. We might ask whether or not this photograph [Sharon Wild, 2001, from The Valley] by the American documentary photographer Larry Sultan, was taken with Edward Hopper's paintings [Hotel Room, 1931] consciously in mind. But the question is irrelevant. To know Hopper's work is to be predisposed to see the world in his terms, consciously or not.

Some years after I first exhibited my work US77, a friend remarked that this image reminded him of Hopper's painting Night Windows. It had not occurred to me until he drew it to my attention."

Victor Burgin continues: "I am not interested in the question of what one artist may or may not have taken from another.

I am referring to the universally familiar phenomenon of looking at one image and having another image spontaneously come to mind.

The images that come to mind are not only such things as identifiable paintings or photographs, or particular images or scenes from films. They may also be more or less vague impressions to which we cannot assign any particular origin. To these belong the ‘fixed images’, the stereotypes of ‘commonsense’ that are the common coinage of mainstream media – popular journalism, television sitcoms, and so on."

• Office at Night Edward Hopper 1940.
• Office at Night [Yellow], Victor Burgin 1986.
• Office at Night [Blue newsreader], Victor Burgin 1986.
• Office at Night [Green], Victor Burgin 1986.

Other possible lines of enquiry are:

• Edward Hopper and the ‘Decisive Moment’.
• Edward Hopper's Influence.
• Gauguin's chair Vincent van Gogh 1888.
• Van Gogh's Chair Vincent van Gogh 1888.
• Big Electric Chair Andy Warhol 1967.
• Graffiti art and negative space destruction art Zhang Dali.
• A Bigger Splash 1967 by David Hockney.
• Absence J. Meejin Yoon 2003.
• Your House 2006 by Olafur Eliasson.
• Marsupial 2006 by Anish Kapoor.

Appearances

"Painting," Gerhard Richter has commented, "is the making of an analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible: giving it form and bringing it within reach."

(‘Gerhard Richter Portraits. Painting Appearances.’ by Paul Moorhouse. National Portrait Gallery, London. 2009).

His early work is of blurred figurative paintings, both with and without colour followed by seductive abstract paintings, with a colour palette that is either brilliant or subdued.

His surprisingly diverse range of work has received prolonged discussion from critics, especially due to Richter's disregard for ‘traditional’ stylistic progression and his use of photographs.

Richter has tried to subvert the hierarchy of art and the everyday. "I believe in nothing", he has said.

Examples of Richter's diverse work both figurative and abstract:

• Firenze 2000.
• Abstract Painting 1995.
• Apple Trees 1987.
• Abstract Painting 1984.
• Three Candles 1975.
• Abstract Painting 1975.
• Gilbert & George 1975.

Colour

"If you let your eye stray over a palette of colours ... you experience satisfaction and delight, like a gourmet savouring a delicacy. Or the eye is stimulated as the tongue is titillated by a spicy dish. But then it grows calm and cool, like a finger after touching ice. There are physical sensations, limited in duration. They are superficial too and leave no lasting impression behind if the soul remains closed."

Wassily Kandinsky is referring to the effect of colour, from his book ‘Concerning The Spiritual in Art.’

Kandinsky: "Colour provokes a psychic vibration. Colour hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body."

• Yellow, Red, Blue Wassily Kandinsky 1925.
• Composition X Wassily Kandinsky 1939.

Other artists who share Kandinsky's search for colour balance and sensitivity are:

• Josef Albers.
• Pablo Picasso
• Matisse
• Frank Stella
• Howard Hodgkin.
• Photographers Ernst Haas and Joel Meyerowitz.
• The Fauves
• Colour Field painters (Morris Louis, Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Noland).

• La Vie Pablo Picasso 1903.
• Three Musicians Pablo Picasso 1921.
• Torn Poster III - Face, NYC Ernst Haas 1960.
• Joel Meyerowitz.
• In Bed in Venice 1984 – 1988 by Howard Hodgkin.
• Homage to the square Josef Albers 1964.
• Equinox Hans Hofmann 1958.
• Sequence No. 11 Jegori Koski 2003.

See also: Elements of Art & Design: Colour and Simultaneous Contrast.

Contemplative spaces

In this world of urban clatter and fast pace, artists and architects explore structures and spaces which can provide opportunities for meditation, contemplation, observation and inspiration.

From Mariko Mori's Temple installations to the paintings of Mark Rothko, the site specific art of Andy Goldsworthy or the windows of Marc Chagall.

• Transcircle Mariko Mori 2004.
• Dream Temple Mariko Mori 1999.
• America Windows Marc Chagall 1977.
Broken Pebbles Andy Goldsworthy.
• Red on Maroon (Seagram Murals) Mark Rothko 1959.

Doppelgänger

‘Doppelganger: Images of the Human Being’ is the title of a newly published book which asks the question: just how do we mask or reveal our inner selves?

"In it, contemporary artists show how digital media has shattered allegiances to Da Vinci's ideal proportions and equipped us with radical modes of expression, erasing or positing new archetypes."

• 138 - 139.
• 232 - 233.

It is possible that the Internet, as the dominant medium for social interactions, can lead to physical anonymity and the birth of new digital identities which reduce the human identity to data?

What might this mean for artists who traditionally challenge stereotypes and explore beyond the superficial.

Christiane Paul, curator of Media Arts at Whitney Museum, says:

"I would say that social media in general have definitely had an enormous impact on artistic practice within the digital field, and by that I do not only mean Facebook or social media platforms ... but also experimentation in virtual worlds such as Second Life".

The traditional definition: A doppelgänger is a tangible double of a living person in fiction, folklore, and popular culture. The word has come to refer to any double or look-alike of a person.

Artists, writers and film-makers have long been interested in portraying doubles, other selves, alter egos, shadows, mirror images and stories of doppelgangers from myths, legends and folklore.

• Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy Man Ray (Emanuel Rabinovitch) ca. 1920 – 1921.

  Duchamp's imaginary self (alter ego.). Spoken, it sounds like "Eros, c'est la vie," or "Eros, that's life."

• Identical twins, Roselle, N.J Diane Arbus 1967.
• La Reproduction Interdit René Magritte 1937.

In Alfred Hitchcock's film ‘Psycho,’ Norman Bates' ‘split personality’ is signalled by his reflection in window glass.

Later, Norman is confronted by Sam Loomis: critics have commented on the physical similarity between the actors cast for the two roles.

• Google by Olaf Breuning 2010.
• Faces Olaf Breuning 2009.
• Kazimir Olaf Breuning 2011.
• Romulus and Remus.

Other possible areas of enquiry are:

• Aziz and Cucher.
• Gillian Wearing.
• Cindy Sherman.
• LawickMüller.
• Dorothee Baumann.
• Tony Oursler.
• William Wegman.
• Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

Hometown

The most everyday places in George Shaw's paintings – the bus shelter, a square of grass, vandalised garages, housing-estates – seem imbued with emotion and significance.

A picture of autumn trees is ambiguously titled The Fall. Outbuildings and a pub feature in a series called Scenes from the Passion. A routine place becomes unexpectedly meaningful.

"You think of childhood as something you walk away from and you look back at it from a long way away. But I feel like ... I'm walking towards the past." George Shaw.

• Untitled (6th November) George Shaw 1999.
• Twelve Short Walks (10) George Shaw 2005.

Microscopic

The drawings of artist Daniel Zeller are rife with repetition, spontaneity, mind boggling obsession and labour-intensive discipline, turning the act of doodling into a full-time, exploratory endeavour.

He has likened his drawings to meditation, aerial photography, digital circuitry, microscopic imagery, anatomy and landscape.

See Daniel Zeller drawing in his studio.

• Enforced Toxification Daniel Zeller 2008.
• Invasive Seclusion Daniel Zeller 2007.

Other micro artists include Jacob El Hanani, Marco Maggi and Simon Frost.

• Basket 2005 (A) Jacob El Hanani 2005.
• Untitled #92 Simon Frost 2006.
• Untitled #82 Simon Frost 2006.
• Hipo-Real Marco Maggi 2008.

Praxis

Thomas Hirschorn: "I'm not trying to be stupid, naive, or intuitive; I am simply interested in praxis."

Definition: Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, practised, embodied, or realized.

Praxis may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas.

This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and many others.

It has meaning in political, educational, and spiritual realms.

Thomas Hirschhorn's projects employ humble materials to create low-tech sculptures and structures that are permeated with images and information.

Hirschhorn's Cavemanman (2002) is a sprawling installation, a packing-tape-and-cardboard cavern with several chambers connected by winding tunnels. Its floor is strewn with empty aluminum cans and fake rocks. Posters from popular culture are plastered on the walls and ceiling, and photocopies of assorted political and philosophical texts line the hallways.

Repeatedly spraypainted across the wall of one room like a mantra is the motto "1 Man = 1 Man", an affirmation of universal equality and a call to disassemble hierarchies. This slogan sets the tone for the utopian postapocalyptic community that might inhabit these caves.

Groups of cardboard human figures and mannequins wrapped in tinfoil are joined together by a system of foil cords that also extend to books on topics such as democracy, equality, and community, as well as to foil explosives – a combination that suggests the power of thought and information.

"To me, the cave is in your brain, the cave is in your mind ... You have to build this cave in your mind and to struggle with what happens in this cave in confronting it with the world."

Thomas Hirschhorn describes his sculptural environments as "collages in the third dimension" and explains that this means "putting things together that are not meant to be put together." Created from the most basic everyday materials, his monumental works are concerned with issues of justice and injustice, power and powerlessness, and moral responsibility.

The artists' propositions, filled with idealism, poetry, and sometimes humour, visualize a space independent of social conventions and xenophobia, where different experiences of love, approval, racial and sexual identification, and equality could exist.

• Lascaux - A visit to the cave.

Veiled

Definition: Partially concealed, disguised, or obscured. Indistinct.

Ian McKeever's work embraces eye, body, mind, soul and spirit. His abstract paintings poetically explore the space and time of nature and the imagination, questioning the very nature of existence itself.

They have been described, "as breathing, luminous surfaces where consciousness floats in veiled structures that lie between the artist and the wider world."

McKeever explains that he explores two major forces of nature; Gravity which roots us to the ground and Light which elevates us and infuses the human spirit.

"In painting a painting one does not set out to paint what one knows but rather tries to touch those things which one does not know and which perhaps cannot be known."

• Hartgrove Painting No 10 Ian McKeever 1993 – 1994.
• Assumptio (appearance) Ian McKeever 1997 – 1998.
• Assembly Painting Ian McKeever 2006 – 2007.

Other lines of enquiry:

• Nature and creativity
• Paul Klee (ref: Pedagogical Sketchbook 1925)
• Land Art
• Monet
• Peter Doig

and McKeever's influences. For example:

• Johannes Vermeer
• Vilhelm Hammershøi
• William Blake
• Caspar David Friedrich
• Robert Smithson
• John Piper
• Graham Sutherland

McKeever describes Vermeer as a painter who painted towards the light, and makes a striking comparison with Hammershoi who he describes as squeezing out all the light that he could.

• Young Woman with a Water Pitcher Johannes Vermeer ca. 1662.
• Woman in Blue Reading a Letter Johannes Vermeer ca. 1663.
• Interior, Strandgade 30 Vilhelm Hammershøi 1908.
• Bedroom Vilhelm Hammershøi 1890.
• Interior with Woman at Piano Vilhelm Hammershøi 1901.
• Entrance to a Lane Graham Sutherland 1943.
• San Marco Venice John Piper 1962.
• Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson 1970.

[Excerpted from a paper written by Wendy Walker at William de Ferrers School.]

Personal Investigation. A2 level. Pre-2012.

Titles used at William de Ferrers School in years previous to 2012 have included:

Caryatid

Auguste Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion.

Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism of the Greeks. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay of light and shadow.

His interest in architecture and the human form resulted in ‘caryatid’ sculptures.

A caryatid is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head.

• Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone Auguste Rodin 1881.
• Crouching Woman Auguste Rodin 1882 – 1884.
• Crouching Caryatid Auguste Rodin.
• The Three Shades Auguste Rodin before 1886.
• Luba Caryatid Stool Luba, D. R. Congo, Zaire, Mid 20th Century.
• Caryatid Amedeo Modigliani 1914.
• Sorrow Vincent van Gogh 1882.
• The Porch of Maidens at Erechtheion, Acroplis 421 – 406 BC.
• Caryatids Caesar's Palace Forum shopping arcade, Las Vegas.

Close up

Edward Weston sought sculptural beauty in the natural world. He produced a remarkable series of close-ups of organic forms including shells, peppers, onions, eggplants, artichokes and cabbages.

In Pepper, one of the photographer's best-known works, a simple vegetable is transformed into a massive form, one with the muscularity of a human torso and the modelling of a great sculpture.

Japonism

Japonism is a French term generally said to have been coined by the French critic Philippe Burty in the early 1870s. It described the craze for Japanese art and design that swept France and elsewhere after trade with Japan resumed in the 1850s, the country having been closed to the West since about 1600.

The rediscovery of Japanese art and design had an almost incalculable effect on Western art. The development of modern painting from Impressionism on was profoundly affected by the flatness, brilliant colour and high degree of stylisation, combined with Realist subject matter, of Japanese woodcut prints.

Artists such as Klimt, Bonnard, Whistler, Beardsley, Toulouse Lautrec [Toulouse Lautrec: The Full Story, a documentary by Waldemar Januszczak] and Degas were all influenced by Ukiyo-e and the work of Utamaro, Hiroshige and Hokusai.

• France – Champagne Pierre Bonnard 1891.
• The Peacock Skirt Aubrey Beardsley 1893.
• Divan Japonais Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1893.
• Chocolat Dancing In Bar Darchille Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1896.
• Woman wiping sweat Kitagawa Utamaro 1798.
• 28 Nagakubo from ‘The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō’, by Utagawa Hiroshige 1834 – 1842.
• The Great Wave off Kanagawa Katsushika Hokusai ca. 1829 – 1832.

Multiple viewpoints

David Hockney quotes these words from Rowley's ‘Principles of Chinese paintings’ as his focus for his painting Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio "... one might travel through miles of landscape, might scale the mountain peaks, or descend into the depth of the valleys, might follow streams to their source or move with the waterfall to its plunge. How wonderfully our apprehension of nature has been expanded, combining in one picture the delights of many places seen in their most significant aspects."

• Nichols Canyon David Hockney 1980.
• Piccadilly 2007 by Clive Head.

Story telling

Paula Rego was born in Portugal, which at that time was a country that had not yet become Americanized, and it still fiercely clung onto its tradition and culture which revolved around storytelling.

There weren't TVs humming away in every house. Families instead gathered around and told each their stories for entertainment. Paula remembers the stories her grandmother, aunts, and other relatives would tell her.

As a child Paula remembers loving the illustrations in her father's big book, Dante's Inferno.

"My paintings tell stories; they do not illustrate stories ... they are not narratives ... everything happens in the present."

• Swallows the Poisoned Apple Paula Rego 1995.
• Snow White and her Step Mother Paula Rego 1995.
• Lucifer, King of Hell Gustave Doré illustrating Canto XXXIV of Divine Comedy, Inferno, by Dante Alighieri; created between 1861 and 1868.
• Bathroom, Scene #4 by Eric Fischl 2005.
• Ophelia John Everett Millais 1851 – 1852.

Systems and Structures

Conrad Shawcross combines in his work an interest in sculpture and science – in particular cosmology, quantum mechanics and musical theory.

"Take an impossible machine design by Rube Goldberg, a contraption built by Heath Robinson, and cross it with a junk sculpture by Jean Tinguely, and you might get something a bit like Conrad Shawcross's The Nervous System. Ridiculously mammoth, and perilously rickety, Shawcross's monstrous structure is a testament to Luddite technology." (Saatchi Gallery)

• The Nervous Systems [2003] (movie) Conrad Shawcross 2003.
• Harmonic Drawings (2007) Conrad Shawcross 2007.
• Perimeter Studies, Arrangement 6 a-d Conrad Shawcross 2010.
• Counterpoint Conrad Shawcross 2006.