Thank you so much for choosing my thorny image in the latest artist challenge. And thank you, Kali @kali66 for hosting and choosing such a fabulous artist in Karl Blossfeldt to emulate!
I have chosen a fellow Canadian artist for this round of the challenge. His work spans over four decades. He began his artistic career as a painter in the 60s and switched to photography inexplicably. His early work was inspired by classical painters with their precisely detailed compositions.
Wall’s later photographs are what he calls “contemplations of snapshots” where he meticulously re-creates moments he has observed into ‘near documentary’.
Often called a conceptual artist, Jeff Wall says that he is not photographing a moment but rather is making art which gives him the freedom to do what he wants.
While much of Wall’s work is carefully re-constructed memories, he also likes to take pictures of places and things, and you can find many examples of this work as well.
From Artnet.com:
Jeff Wall is a leading contemporary Canadian photographer whose work is concerned with ideas about the nature of images, representation, and memory. His large-scale photographs appropriate the visual language of advertising in their use of backlit transparencies and large scale. The subjects are “cinematographic” reconstructions of everyday moments, fiction, and art history, which he refers to as “near documentary”. “[Near documentary] means that they are pictures whose subjects were suggested by my direct experience, and ones in which I tried to recollect that experience as precisely as I could, and to reconstruct and represent it precisely and accurately,” he said of his process. Born on September 29, 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, he received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970. Mainly focusing on academia during the following decade, he studied with the famed British historian T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. A Conceptual artist and art historian until the 1980s, Wall began creating photographs styled after artists including Hokusai and Édouard Manet as well as novels like the Invisible Man. In 2012, a print of his image Dead Troops Talk (1993) broke auction records at Christie’s and became the third most expensive photograph ever sold at the time. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Wall currently lives and works in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.
Here are just a few of the many links available about this artist. There are also many interviews on YouTube as well. https://www.artsy.net/artist/jeff-wall
There is something in Jeff Wall’s vast collection of art for everyone to be able to re-produce. Yet, it is not the exact reproduction that I would like to see in this challenge, but rather, the composition and feeling he brings to his work. The art he creates captures the moment in time much more eloquently than the actual moment would be. That is your goal as well.
@30pics4jackiesdiamond
I really hemmed and hawed as to whether I should use him. His work is so demanding that he may be difficult to do.
But then - it is called a challenge so I guess we will see how it goes!
@4rky
I would love you to enter it if it fits in the proper time ... I know that this was a tough challenge for those who are in lockdown but he did do things that you could do from home.
Is there a way that you could make a composite out of the one you were thinking of, and that would make it fit the time restraints?
Write a Reply
Sign up for a free account or Sign in to post a comment.
Tweets ahoy!
Join the Group
Pin With Me
I really hemmed and hawed as to whether I should use him. His work is so demanding that he may be difficult to do.
But then - it is called a challenge so I guess we will see how it goes!
I would love you to enter it if it fits in the proper time ... I know that this was a tough challenge for those who are in lockdown but he did do things that you could do from home.
Is there a way that you could make a composite out of the one you were thinking of, and that would make it fit the time restraints?