Play and Abstraction -50 Sides of Objects

By Jerry Lee

Theme

Play and Abstraction

Method

‘Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color, and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world’ This week I decided to explore the idea of shape in abstract art. I created a short video in which the items in an image are replaced by the same types of items from other images. The only thing which stays the same is the shapes of those items. The entire project is made with Photoshop and Premiere Pro, it consists 50 different images and some visual effects. 

Context

The ideas come fromthe video’ Make Your Life Easier with these Photoshop Digital Painting Techniques’. In the video, the artist used the color on an image as a reference and started to create new art by reconstructing the colors on the original image. The art style went from photorealistic to abstract and went from abstract to impressionism, which portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, and used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed color, to achieve an effect of intense color vibration.

Just like last week, I use Constructive Play as the main idea of my weekly response . I use something I am familiar with to create something different. When viewing abstract art, people can distinguish different shapes used in the artwork, but they often have a hard time describing what the entire image is about. In my video, most people can recognize some of the items in the image, but I think only a few people can figure out that is a picture of items on a shelf beside a wall. The work also use the idea of cubism,which objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form. Instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

Response

https://youtu.be/QXFQj2P3hm8

Reflection

 I came up with the idea during the class, but I was a little bit unsure if my idea would be considered as abstraction because the material I was going to use is from pictures, and most examples from the meeting are either hand-drawn animation or videos with a bunch of weird shapes. However, after seeing the example Serial Parallels by Max Hattler, I am certain that my idea would work.

My weekly response reminds me of those 3D models whose UVs are poorly edited. When people look at it, they still know what those models are, but they just look unusual and weird (sometimes ‘ugly’ in an interesting way). At the beginning of the creation, I tried to find images that fits perfectly with the shapes, but they didn’t meet my expectation. Therefore, I decided to just ‘go crazy’ on those images, I try to rotate, scale, flip those images and create something unusual. The hardest thing to do is to manage the layers in the Photoshop project. I have to learn how to use masks and layers work in Photoshop. Overall, I am quite satisfied with the result. It doesn't look good, but I think it conveys the idea successfully.

References

https://www.famly.co/blog/encouraging-constructive-play#:~:text=Put%20simply%2C%20constructive%20play%20is,on%20understanding%20how%20children%20learn.