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Wivenhoe Park

In this piece I was looking at the idealistic portrayal of the English landscape within the history and tradition of English paintings. I chose to focus on John Constable specifically as I find him to be the most familiar and best known outside of the art community. I was drawn to the romantic idealistic nature of his portrayal of the English countryside.

After creating my Summer piece depicting a generic green field and blue sky (ignoring the large explosion) I enjoyed the stereotypical and simplistic nature of this generic landscape and so creating a 3D model felt like a natural progression. I believe that by using a cliché language the accessibility of the piece is heightened and the piece seems unoriginal at first. Once the viewer looks closely they find out that this cliché scene has many dark images and is far from an idilic rural scene, in fact the piece is far from and has an overwhelming theme of conflict, I wanted this to contrast from the picture perfect scene of England, portrayed in many of Constable works.

The specific Constable piece that I immediately wanted to transcribe was "Wivenhoe Park" (Fig.1) this was due to the simplicity of the subject matter. The piece was also originally painted in 1816, so it felt fitting to recreate the scene as a (slightly) more suitable image representing 2016 society exactly 200 years down the line. I originally wanted to base my reproduction more closely to the painting but soon found my model skills were not up to standard, in hindsight this helped me as I felt less confined to the original.

Although I was very happy with the end result I couldn't help but feel like this piece was a slight anti climax once concluded. I believe I spent too much time and resource focusing on the material and process of making the sculpture, although I am happy that I have experimented in 3D, I think that in the future I am going to focus more on the concept of my work rather than the process in which it is communicated.


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