Book selected: European Paintings from the Gulbenkian Collection
I chose a book of European paintings as I trained as a painter in the European tradition. I was then faced with the question of “how do I work with a book that has such a wealth of rich imagery in it already?” In my own practice I am interested in the relationship between negative and positive space, with particular reference to drawing.
Inspired by the work of artists as diverse as Ellsworth Kelly, Lucio Fontana, Jake and Dino Chapman and Salvador Dali, I intuitively chose a negative space from each image and almost fully cut it out with a scalpel. This creates a window that provides glimpses of the image beneath whilst also revealing random fragments of text about that image. This process disrupts and re- interprets both the visual and verbal narratives within the book
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I am interested in intervening in a way that draws your attention back to the inherent qualities of the original image.
web : www.jennysmith.org.uk
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