Oil paintings
08/09/2024
The Drumkeeper & Brooks Nielsen
Oil painting as a medium resonates with Retro-spective's themes of memory, time, and nostalgia. It is one of the oldest and most revered mediums in fine art, maintaining its relevance across centuries while evoking a sense of history and permanence. The enduring nature of oil painting reflects the persistence of traditional mediums through time as well as memory The subject matter of The Drumkeeper and Brooks Nielsen, refers to a personal memory of mine where I was obsessed with the band called The Growlers. I listened to every album through and through, found my favourites and overplayed them, re-watched live shows of theirs everyday. Life went on and 7 years later, I revisited The Growlers. I listened to them again for weeks and created these paintings inspired by their "Beach Goth" aesthetic. Although I have for the most part outgrown their music, I will still listen to that live show on repeat and some albums still hit in all the right places. Their songs will always encapsulate a time of my life which I can nostalgically look back on. For this project, I have created timelapse video of The Drumkeeper, documenting the process of painting in order to explore the themes of memory and time. A timelapse compresses lengthy footage into a fast-paced sequence of images, creating the illusion of continuous motion. This effect echoes Roget's theory of the persistence of vision, which explains how the human retina retains an image for a brief moment after it disappears, making a series of still images appear as if they are moving. The timelapse technique parallels this phenomenon, visually representing how memory pieces together fragments of time.
The Séance & The Silent Witness
These two paintings encapsulate my aesthetic of combining nostalgic and eerie visuals with my contemporary painting practice. I stumbled upon a mutual Instagram friend who had taken these ominous, black and white film photographs of children in vintage attire playing games in what looks like woods on a farm. The photos felt like it could belong to a time of the far away past. She gave me permission to paint the photos, and I decided to colorize the photos according to my nostalgic palette (purples, pinks and greens). The images were begging for an impressionistic interpretation which strays a bit from by clean and crisp, attention-to-detail style. I love how the paintings feel like a section from a story. Anyone could add their narrative to the image and let their minds roam free.
Fathers Gaze & But who do you really know?
Most of my reference images I use for my paintings are taken from old family albums or found, vintage photographs. When my father passed away a few years ago, i delved deep into those albums and found many surprises. One photo that caught my eye was one of my father as a young man standing on a rock at shore. His face looked puzzled. I enjoy expressions that are undefined and ambiguous. I painted these two paintings: Fathers Gaze represents things as they appear to be. The atmosphere remains ominous and feels like it is from an old time. But who do you really know? delves deeper into the unseen elements of relationships which are often a lot more complicated than how we see them on the surface level. The painting here is more obscure and abstracted, signifying the complexities of paternal relationships. These paintings allowed me to explore all my past memories of my father and how passing time has changed how I feel about my dad.
