This week we've listened to a podcast which gave us some unexpected ideas. It's called Everything is Alive and it's unscripted interview show in which all the subjects are inanimate objects. It's an excellent idea for a podcast (wish we'd thought of it!) And the episode we listened to was an interview with a painting. He's a painting of President William Howard Taft, but for us it was more the idea or concept of a painting. Throughout the interview the painting says all sorts of amazing stuff such as "no one ever looks at me, just was I'm depicting" - a very astute observation. At one point the interviewer even attempts to draw the painting and ends up drawing Taft instead (much to the painting's frustration).
It gave us a whole bunch of ideas (some more fleshed out than others) but all of them were to do with painting. The initial ideas we had were about the personification of a painting; what does a painting see. The work would then be paintings from the view of the subjects in the paintings, produced in the style of the paintings themselves. Another idea around this theme was paintings of moments that happen around famous paintings. Subjects within paintings must observe huge political decisions being made. The podcast also discussed unfinished and stolen paintings, the most famous being the unfinished painting of George Washington. Our idea was then to commission someone to paint only unfinished portion of the painting on a canvas the same size as the original.
The part about stolen/missing artworks made us think about painting the spot where Barbara Hepworth sculpture was stolen from; the work would appear like a generic landscape painting but would in fact be a painting of absence. On a similar note, we wanted to make some frames that have Windowlene cream on the glass (similar to windows of buildings that are getting redecorated) and the frame is same dimensions as particular stolen artworks. We also wanted to make something about the queue to see space where Mona Lisa was stolen from. The Louvre was, unintentionally, exhibiting the first conceptual installation in the history of art: the absence of a painting.
Some more general painting ideas were to commission portraits of us and then use the paintings to commission another and so on and eventually the image will deteriorate. We also wanted to produce some paintings of locations/scenes within films that are about reality. The dream locations/sets in Inception, biblical boat journey in The Truman Show, girl with the red dress scene The Matrix.
A very early idea is also to reproduced the fictional painting from. The Grand Budapest Hotel titled Boy with Apple. Fun going down the rabbit hole a bit with this - hopefully some of them get all the way to made!
