Domaine, acrylic on panel, 40x58cm
A painting I did in between the EIPW and the beginning of Semester 1.
I’m not sure if this has anything to do with the project I’ve set myself up for this year, but perhaps it’s relevant that this is the sort of art I make for fun, for myself, when I don’t have any project/brief/deadline/examiner in mind.
This is a painting of the small town where I lived in 2013. It was in the countryside immediately outside the city of Geneva. Most of the nearby pastures belonged to wealthy neighbours. These miniature farms could not realistically support a genuinely self-sustaining lifestyle, nor could they be for commercial gain. They were owned by people who already had money to spare on expensive hobbies, who moved to this particular area where they could also have a small slice of countryside in which to play at farming (from a lakeside property where they could keep their boat.)
I’m fascinated by this notion of the idyllic farming life: the romanticisation of farming. You see it in packaging all the time. Happy chickens pecking on a green field with a blue sunny sky. In what universe?
I was there (in Geneva’s ‘countryside’ fringe) during one of the rainiest springs on record, and the run-off from all the nitrogen these hobbyist farmers used to fertilise their fields went straight into Lake Geneva, making the algae grow like crazy until the usually clear water was thick with green sludge.
And I think this was the point where I started thinking seriously about the purposes, and wider environmental effects, of farming practices. Thereby setting the ball rolling for my current line of investigation.
Not that any of this back-story is evident in the painting itself. It’s just a painting of a couple of paddocks in winter. My goal for this project is to get these kinds of stories and ideas into the image/artwork without needing to be explained.
On a technical note:
My painting is very much informed by printmaking, particularly screen printing. I love using cyans and magentas, I love fields of flat colour, ‘posterised’ colour separation effects and using overlapped / slightly misregistered layers to reveal different colours underneath.
Perhaps some of these qualities suggest a link to impressionism as well as printmaking. But I often call what I do ‘printmaking with paint.’ I prefer to work from (my own) photos, often which I’ve highly retouched to exaggerate the primary CMYK colours, and can relate to Richter’s statement that he is not making paintings but ‘making photographs’ - the act of painting representationally means to process an image like a human photocopier.
Some detail shots:
