After seeing the direction of my latest group of paintings, my adviser, David Cruz, requested that I look at two artists who he said he sees similarities with in my work. They are Marlene Dumas from South Africa and German artist, Gerhard Richter. I took a look at the work of both artists online and chose three works for each that both caught my attention and works where I could also see a connection to my current work. Here I will present the three from Dumas that I studied. Next week I will address my Richter choices.
I was immediately attracted to this piece primarily, I believe, because it is a portrait. But the style is also very much like the style in which I am using paint for this series. The paint is applied thinly and there is also aspects of the composition (the hands, the collar) that are outlined. Elderly women also play a heavy role in my work right now because I am mining old photographs from an album and many of the pictures record the older German women from my childhood. In both my work and Dumas’ above portrait, the women have a witchy-quality to them which I find interesting because when my mother began telling me the story of her life one day, she began at the Bavarian mountains where she reported that it was rumored witches lived.
This work by Dumas attracts me because of the pairing of a human portrait with an animal’s head. Of late, I have been playing with self-portraits and goat heads and while I have abandoned that path, the new work does include a child with goat eyes, animals, and I am planning to replace the head of a subject with an animal’s head for one of the final pieces. Even before my work with goat heads, I have always been attracted to art that combines animal imagery with human anatomy. I believe this may have sparked from my childhood fascination with Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons.
This Dumas portrait has a dark quality. There seems to be something strange or off about the person presented here. There is also a strangeness and oddity to the vignettes that I am painting. There is something off about each scene that seeks to touch the sensibility of the viewer in a way that disturbs but holds them. I see this quality in the above Dumas portrait. Again the quality of the paint is thin and outlines are prevalent.