imaget3xtualities

Color Translations + Scores

found images, collage > new visual narratives                             

          

Some people have called Pop artist James Rosenquist (US.b.1933) Haiku master of found images creating enormous visual narratives that are visually and emotionally charged.  

At first glance one wonders how a the front grill of a Ford has anything to do with a plate full of Chef-Boy-Ardee? 

Why did Rosenquist decide to bring these specific forms together out of the trillion objects out there to choose from? 
As viewers we are displaced and thrown way off course.

If we care to look for a while, his paintings reveal themselves slowly to us. Rosenquist’s discordant images of birthday cakes, JFK portraits, fingernails, lipsticks and fire arms come together and actually have quite a bit in common when one considers the formal elements of design. 

• Make use of found images that share the formal element of SHAPE to repeat throughout your collected image banks. Experiment with variety of scale and proportion. Experiment with the orientation of the image.
• Create 4 collages each being 8 x 10  inches in your sketchbooks.  This will be used as the 'sketch' for your next local colour assignment completed in gouache, acrylic or oil.
• Select one of your collages to scale up and create a painting from. 
• Grid off your collage into one inch squares and create a grid of that unit on a piece of 140# watercolor paper or stretched canvas. Float your image equally from the edge of the paper. Draw out unit to unit relationships on paper extremely lightly (you DO NOT want to see pencil marks in your final).
• Grid your 140# paper off into 2" squares allowing for a 2:1 ratio. With a pencil transpose the contour edges onto the watercolor paper
• Begin to create the painting – matching background local colors. Creating large areas of colour, working from GENERAL >> SPECIFIC, and working from lightest areas >> darkest.