I get a sense that you've really got stuck into the research side of this project and your city sounds like a terrible place! I've been giving the same advice to lots of your classmates about the subtle different between a student creating a city out of the motifs in their artist's work and asking questions about how your artist would approach the design of a city. For example, when Bacon painted the structures of the human body, he did so by distorting/melting its proportions and applying a sort double-exposure approach borrowed from cubism and early photography. It's maybe a more interesting question to ask 'What would Bacon do to the structures of a building?' as opposed to 'making buildings out of human bodies and flesh'. Do you see the difference? One approach is based on a 'fancy dress approach' - dressing buildings to look like Francis Bacon paintings - while the other is 'think about design as Bacon might think about design'.
Bacon wanted his paintings to express the distortions and unhappiness of the human experience - let's look at some architectural references that might be said to express similar feelings:
In regards to your thumbnails, I do like the 'wire cage' idea you've picked from Bacon's paintings. I can see that working very well. In terms of creating some 'Bacon' style thumbnails for your buildings, I think you should try to 'stop' drawing and work in a way that more closely resembles some of his influences. For example, in order to develop a kind of Bacon-style building, you might consider photography an real world architectural element - such as an old house or similar - and then photographing it from a number of different angles, and then, in Photoshop, layer those different images together to create the 'cubist' double-exposed effect - then work with that fractured image in Photoshop further to move it onwards even more. You should consider working with traditional paint methods too - and moving back and forth between trad and digital workflows.
I think you should create a word stack in regards to Bacon's work - literally pull out the themes, but also the processes, and then instead of seeking to design a city that looks like a Francis Bacon painting, try and design elements that Francis Bacon would have designed if he was working directly alongside you, but applying his various techniques and thematic preoccupations to ideas about structures, spaces and places. It's a slightly different, more truly design-led approach.
I would say too, that in terms of Bacon's preoccupations with his Screaming Pope, I wonder what he'd think about being asked to design a church/cathedral...?
OGR 06/11/2016
ReplyDeleteHi Greta,
I get a sense that you've really got stuck into the research side of this project and your city sounds like a terrible place! I've been giving the same advice to lots of your classmates about the subtle different between a student creating a city out of the motifs in their artist's work and asking questions about how your artist would approach the design of a city. For example, when Bacon painted the structures of the human body, he did so by distorting/melting its proportions and applying a sort double-exposure approach borrowed from cubism and early photography. It's maybe a more interesting question to ask 'What would Bacon do to the structures of a building?' as opposed to 'making buildings out of human bodies and flesh'. Do you see the difference? One approach is based on a 'fancy dress approach' - dressing buildings to look like Francis Bacon paintings - while the other is 'think about design as Bacon might think about design'.
Bacon wanted his paintings to express the distortions and unhappiness of the human experience - let's look at some architectural references that might be said to express similar feelings:
http://plusarchitekt.tumblr.com/post/129282649879/collapsing-architecture-seth-clarke-via-trouge
http://www.quertime.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/collapsing_windows_beautiful_architecture_photography.jpg
http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2010/12/02/collapsing/
http://portfolios.risd.edu/gallery/22719689/Collapsing-Architecture
http://www.architravel.com/architravel_wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Dancing-House_3.jpg
In regards to your thumbnails, I do like the 'wire cage' idea you've picked from Bacon's paintings. I can see that working very well. In terms of creating some 'Bacon' style thumbnails for your buildings, I think you should try to 'stop' drawing and work in a way that more closely resembles some of his influences. For example, in order to develop a kind of Bacon-style building, you might consider photography an real world architectural element - such as an old house or similar - and then photographing it from a number of different angles, and then, in Photoshop, layer those different images together to create the 'cubist' double-exposed effect - then work with that fractured image in Photoshop further to move it onwards even more. You should consider working with traditional paint methods too - and moving back and forth between trad and digital workflows.
I think you should create a word stack in regards to Bacon's work - literally pull out the themes, but also the processes, and then instead of seeking to design a city that looks like a Francis Bacon painting, try and design elements that Francis Bacon would have designed if he was working directly alongside you, but applying his various techniques and thematic preoccupations to ideas about structures, spaces and places. It's a slightly different, more truly design-led approach.
I would say too, that in terms of Bacon's preoccupations with his Screaming Pope, I wonder what he'd think about being asked to design a church/cathedral...?