Week 8 - 14th-18th November - IMAGE/OBJECT Outcome + Assessment

In this final week I mostly prepared for assessment, finishing my 1000 word text and writing my self evaluation, however I also looked more closely at the work of Cornelius Volker (click here for full research) and found his methods and ideas very interesting. The idea of capturing the leftover wake of a person as portraiture instead of the literal image of the person, summarising the trail they leave behind instead of them as a presence in the moment. The way he also creates a series of similar but different paintings of linked objects to analyse their nature is also similar to the work we did in OBJECT, so I felt creating some Volker-inspired outcomes could be an interesting link between my IMAGE and OBJECT workshops.

Firstly I painted two sets of keys, the first of unknown origin, the second, my own set of keys. I find keys interesting first because of the implication of action and unlocking, the potential of these objects to open on to a greater concept than themselves, and secondly because they often hold personal momentos to points in a person's lifetime, souvenirs, a lucky penny or other talismans. My own key chain features a plastic minion from a kinder egg which I added for irony's-sake, and appeared here as an estranged pop culture reference which I found fitting to Volker's typical narrative. There is a contradiction between these two sets which I also appreciated, the first clearly corporate with a room or locker number emblazoned in red and the second obviously personal with the novelty keychain and variety of differently coloured and shaped keys and fobs.

In my second piece, I created a portrait of a smoker, and in this second attempt also responded to Volker's technique of using a drop reflection along the base of the objects as if stood on a high shine surface. To create this accurately I laid my source objects onto a mirror, allowing me to draw both the real object and it's reflection proportionately. After lowering the effectiveness of my paintings during the IMAGE workshop by not representing text accurately, I also paid particular attention to the typographical/branding elements of these products. By spending a little extra time on the text and labelling I was able to make the overall finish of my work a lot more convincing.

This second painting was my favourite of the two, not only because I think it captured the painterly style of Volker's work more appropriately but also because certain details such as the reflective metal topper and label on the lighter were represented particularly realistically. Using the mirror to capture the reflective shadows of the objects also made my work more believable and visually effective. It was also interesting to consider this inverted version of my object, as a different way of representing a still life. It was also nice to do a little painting from a physical object instead of collaging or from sketches.

Overall I really liked this little additional development to my Image/Object work