#1 - Blind Portrait
Dimensions: 60 x 84 (cm)
Medium: oil, acrylic, ink, charcoal powder, watercolour on paper
In “Blind Portrait”, I experimented with a new form of art – painting by touch. Like what its name suggests, I completed the painting with my eyes closed and painted myself by tracing my contours with my fingers and making marks simultaneously. Painting in this way almost seems paradoxical because we have come to associate the very act of making art with the act of seeing.
My “blind” painting, therefore, seeks to challenge this tradition.
I used a wide range of colours, mediums, and tools painted on top of each other to create visual depths and perspectives, revealing many forms of myself – different but the same. The large size of the paper enabled me to paint expressively, and my upper body moved with each stroke carved enthusiastically. I was inspired by the action paintings in Abstract Expressionism, in which artists painted with spontaneity and intensity of gestural movements. By applying similar concepts to my self-portrait, I wanted to show that our understanding of ourselves, or anyone, is often restricted to the doors of visual perception, and infinity awaits us if we unchain ourselves from one sense.
#2 - The Wind, Reenacted
| When I first picked up a paintbrush, I painted the wind.
Dimensions: 50 x 60 (cm)
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
In this painting, the wind is the only artist. In the studio, the windows ajar, my eyes closed. I felt the breeze pressing my skin; I left streaks on the canvas depending on its strength and direction. Everything was created by touch between the imperceptible air and the corporeal body. I used a nocturnal colour palette (forest blue, soft maroon, moon yellow) to highlight the absence of visuals, imitating the enclosed dark of the eyelids’ backside and the vibrance of the tactile perception: vision is a futile device now. The wind on your skin is like a blooming midnight sun.
#3 - Slumberland
| Is it that our whole vision was never quite complete, that it was too transient and not always well-informed?
Dimensions: 50 x 60 (cm)
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
I painted this to capture the moment of falling asleep when the border between dream and reality deliquesces and mingles. Like the dark and light colours blending into each other, the two lands entangle. Visions, no longer concrete yet always demanding remembrance, become a succession of distorted, ephemeral pictures, like the geometric patterns painted. Time, the measure of all things, fails itself in this enigmatic realm, hence explaining the clock without hands. The crimson blob is at once alarming and inviting, appearing as both the closest and the furthest point in the painting, embodying an entrance into slumberland and a reminder of what is left behind.
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