The Painted Word - Writing The Image

Abstract

This thesis ‘The Painted Word – Writing the Image’ explores the subject of written poetry and a studio process of conversion of text into abstract ‘chromatic fade’ artworks of light, colour, and emotion. During the research I looked deeply into the history of art and text, specifically processes like ekphrasis and the history of semiotics, and artists who have worked from personal or borrowed text sources, but, I discovered few artists who I can relate directly to my technique. One contemporary artist, in particular, Jenny Holzer has produced recent work that bears some relation to my studio processes. In addition, I also look at several modernist and contemporary artists who have created works that are based in a text but are not visually similar to my own, or are only visually similar but do not derive their work from text or literature. In my studio works I have been enquiring into the development of new processes and techniques, focusing on creating art I consider ‘more of its time.’ That is, refining a process in the studio that uses a ‘synthesis’ of both the traditional and hand made, and new digital studio techniques to achieve ‘experiential’ works. These works, which are text and drawing based, but painted with light and colour i.e. something like colour poems. These works are neither poems, paintings nor photographs, not landscapes or pure abstractions; they sit somewhere within the ‘expanded field’ of contemporary art as something like chromatic ‘graphic immersions.’ They are not limited by the traditional techniques that I have used previously, but by the parameters of my studio investigation, and the expanded options of twenty-first-century technology, for my postgraduate exhibition at Sydney College of the Arts, December 2015.