Water & Fire (Week 9 Theme: Forces)

By Helen Kwok

Theme: Forces

Context:

To suit the theme of Forces, each of us had to draw three random constraints from a hat. The three constraints I ended up with were:

1. Only red and white colour
2. Only use red and white and blue colour
3. Water is flammable

As my final piece of work had to be only red and white, I needed a solution where I could still show something as water even if it's red, and make it instantly recognisable. For example, if I did a water drop in red, people might interpret it as blood instead of water. That led me down the path of images of ocean and waves, and with the sun behind the ocean, as that's a well known image that most people already know of, and often used in artwork such as Edvard Munch's The Sun painting. Ivan Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave painting made me think of using the sun turning into a fireball, and the idea of showing the ocean burning into flames (see attached sketch). Vija Celmins's Ocean lithograph drawing also inspired me on how to depict the rippling surface of the ocean waters in my playdoh painting.

I really wanted to use playdoh again as a method, furthering the skills I picked up back in Week 2's Tinkering class, but also animate the final piece of work through my process. Only using the red playdoh and white canvas will also impose limitations to my work, so I only have the two colours to create my artwork (the positive and negative spaces). Apparently I'm also my own context now, as my work from Week 2's Paint with Playdoh shows up when I google search "playdoh painting". :/

Method: Only use playdoh to create my piece of artwork like paint, taking photos during the process. Then animate the photos into a stop motion animation in Premiere Pro.

Response:

As my first two rules contradicted with one another, I interpreted the second rule as a limitation - so I can only use red, white and blue colours, but I didn't need to use all three. While my first rule specifically says only red and white. So using only red and white still fits within both rules. 

Some thoughts as I was going through my playdoh painting process (refer to the photos above):

1. Sketching some ideas on paper first.
2. Starting with a blank canvas and my red playdoh.
3. Painting the wave outline.
4. Filling it in with red playdoh.
5. Adding texture to the ocean, and making bits stick out a bit.
6. Adding the sun slowly rising, and adding reflection to the ocean by taking away playdoh (showing the white canvas).
7. Sun turns into a flame.