Following on from my paintings last term, I made a couple of sketches using pretty awful free Photoshop-alternative platforms such as GIMP and a website called photo-warp.com in order to plan for future paintings whilst at home without any materials.
Initially inspired by a screenshot from an episode of the 1995 Japanese mecha anime series directed by Mavashi Ikea, ‘Mobile Suit Gundam Wing’ that I found on @thecableguy’s Instagram story, which depicts the surreal scene of two colossal robots relaxing on a mountain-side meadow. It reminded me of the painting I had completed for the show last term, a depiction of violence (or perhaps a temporary lapse in it) within a rural setting. It’s a strange image but one that I find quite beautiful. Although so obviously man-made, the figures become integrated into the landscape quite seamlessly, like rock formations or a strange kind of foliage.
It also reminded me slightly (of course on a very trivial level, as the image is completely fictitious and designed for entertainment and not documentation) of Aernout Mik’s two channel documentary film entitled ‘Raw Footage’ (1) The moments of quietness within turmoil are haunting enough as it is, but when set in the expanse of the countryside they seem even more precious.
I tried creating my own version of these fantastical and quite ridiculous scenes, using photos from my own camera roll and images taken from some bootleg anime VCDs that I bought from Pimlico market (one of which happens to be a few episodes from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing). I wanted to make these images obviously constructed (if you can get any more obvious than collaging cartoons onto a photograph) and so ‘looped’ the figures round the imaginary ‘back’ of the image. Where one of the images leaves the boundary of the scene, is is teleported to the other side. I don’t want these to look like some kind of DeviantArt fan art (see below) but I’m not sure if that’s entirely avoidable without some serious manipulation of the imagery. I’m also wondering whether painting the images will give them a different dimension, but have yet to discover the answer to that.
(2) This is what I want to avoid.
I also tried to make landscapes out of the pre-existing figurative imagery of anime fight scenes, creating expanses out of bodily form. This started out as a mere attempt to stretch out the figures I was using in the image above but quickly turned into a complete destruction of the image. I am aware that this has already been done before and find it quite cliché. It’s the kind of thing I see popping up on Facebook pages like ‘UrbanSpoon’ and ‘Graffiti StreetArt GLOBE 2’ and I don’t find it particularly interesting as a concept. However, I did do a similar thing in order to create some looser sketches of made-up landscapes, which I thought could be interesting in terms of form and colour. Indeed, the scenes I ‘created’, aside from their heavily pixelated aesthetic, could potentially be quite believable. However, there’s always an odd colour choice or angle that throws the whole composition off, turning it into something more abstract, a less clear field of vision.
When drawn or painted, and the signifiers of the initial process stripped from the image, I think these could be quite interesting. It also brings into play the question of whether this is still a portrait. The platform I used for this (photo-warp.com) has an extremely limited set of tools for warping images. The one that I used exclusively allows you to select points on the image via a mouse-click and pull them across the threshold of the image. The tool allows for very little control, and interestingly won’t let you get rid of information, only move it around and push it to the sides of the canvas until its no longer visible but is still, in theory, ‘there.’ This really interested me in the way that low resolution images and weavings have always fascinated me. Just because we have microscopes that tell us everything’s made up of tiny cells, and telescopes that can show us details of the moon, doesn’t mean that what we see with our eyes is any less real. We are still being given all that information, the only difference is that we don’t have the technology within our eyes to see and compute it. Similarly with these warped images, all the information is still there, it’s just been displaced. Does that make it less real? It changes the way we read it but does it change the subject itself?
(1) Aernout, M., ‘Raw Footage’
http://www.ubu.com/film/mik_raw.html
(2) Various Artists,
https://www.deviantart.com/?section=&global=1&q=gundam+wing&offset=48