Week One - #3

Stuart Duffin RSA

Your Move

Mezzotint engraving

Stuart Duffin’s Your Move engraving is the next piece that really caught my eye. I love black and white imagery and feel that the multitude of blackness in the image gives you an eerie feeling that you are meant to question. On top of the blackness, I find that the image is a mix of different aesthetics with the woman being like a romantic statue, but the rest of the image is in the modern world. You can’t really tell if the birds or the book she is looking at are smoking or meant to be on fire and this leads you to mysteriously check the text on the left. I like text incorporated in art especially given my emphasis on historical visualization. The snippet of text on the left is just as eerie and mysterious as the image. I can’t tell if the message is meant to be hopeful or ominous if it is meant to be about the virtue of putting yourself first or the vice of it. The dual nature of this piece of artwork is incredibly compelling to the viewer. I find it successful how the images are contained in window like archways to help you perceive that you are looking through to a real scene in the past.

Week One - #2

Patricia Cain

Nullabor Landscape II, 2021

Mixed Media

Patricia Cain’s work interests me because it seems like an impossible task to create a landscape without any concrete images. This painting looks almost like what the artist has left over on their smock after painting a different painting. She clearly interpreted the landscape through a chaotic lens, and I wonder if that had anything to do with being produced during the pandemic. I think that the colors she used make it so unique because they are very industrial and concrete, and the landscape is not at all cloaked in green and blue tones of the real earth. The negative space is also a very important part of the painting, there is nearly half of the painting missing from both the top and the bottom unlike any other landscape. This gives the illusion that you don’t know where to walk in this landscape and whether you are going to walk off into the sky or into a hole. It’s quite anxiety producing but the repetitiveness of strokes also has a calming effect.

Week One - #1

Jackie Berridge

Telling Tales

Oil on Linen

I first want to start my exploration of the fine art in the Royal Scottish Academy by addressing this oil painting “Telling Tales” By Jackie Berridge. My entire project over the course of this year has been about telling tales of Scottish myths and legends and I am slowly piecing together a way that I can tell them through a painting or drawing. I love this painting because there is so many different scenes that are simultaneously informative and mysterious. I have been really consumed with focusing on one subject in my art coming from a portrait background, but I love the way Berridge has let go of the strict boundaries of space and made sure that a litany of subjects are presented despite being somewhat unrealistically placed. Her colors and her composition really mirror a childlike artistic vision that starts off very pure in their design and goal of trying to make a good painting. I would love to learn from this and find a way to let go of some of my tedious rules of realism in my art.