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August 11, 2005

Anatomy of splatter

A commission from Mr Edwards in Glasgow has got me back into the swing of things. Mr Edwards, who already has some of my figurative work, wants a giant red splash on his wall – “as if you’ve thrown a bucket of red paint at the canvas”.

Well if you throw a bucket of red paint at a canvas sadly it doesn’t look like you’ve thrown a bucket of red paint at a canvas, it just looks a mess. To get a canvas that looks like you’ve just thrown a bucket of red paint at it you could line up blank canvases from here to Tesco’s and still not get it.

As a Foley Artist will tell you, to get the sound of something on a film you don’t always use the actual thing. Which tells us something about perception and what we think things sound, and indeed, look like, as opposed to what they actually are [and do]. In this, the media is often self-fulfilling. That is: we have heard gunshots on film and television for so long, if we hear a real gunshot we wonder what it is. Effects in the media are exaggerated to highten our excitement.

So to make an image that looks like a bucket of red paint has been thrown at the canvas I shall have to spend a long time flinging paint about to achieve the desired effect. Once more proving art is an illusion to get to the truth.

blot-v-sm.jpg

ink dropped from 3m onto white cartidge paper, 30mm x 35mm

Posted by john at August 11, 2005 11:11 AM

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