New film proposal, Matte painting progress, Sim paintings, Podcast devlopments

This week has been a little quieter for our own making. We’ve applied for a couple of call-out with a new film idea which is semi-lockdown based. The film itself is a vlogger reviewing a film about the power and mystery of imagination. They go into detail when describing certain aspects of the movie such as the dialogue and how the film made them feel. However, they are vague when it comes to actor’s names and the title is never disclosed. We’ve framed it around the thinking that ideas always unfold unhindered in our minds and unlike in film, are only limited by our imagination and even if we’re stuck inside, our ideas can take us all over the world and hopefully beyond. Hopefully someone likes the idea but there’s so many people who will be applying at the moment we’re fairly certain we won’t be chosen. Either way, it’s a fairly easy work to produce and all the hard work has been done, all that’s needed now is to execute it. 

We’ve finally got a progress image of our first matte painting! It looks pretty good and it’ll be very exciting when we eventually receive it. We still haven’t worked on another one yet but we’re definitely going to think more about it this week. 

Something we’ve been thinking more about recently is the sim paintings. These are paintings done by Sims within the game and there's a painting for each 'level' of the Sim's ability. It was a work about how art is percieved within popular culture and more specifically video games. We were thinking about getting them painted all the same small size. Perhaps it’s because of getting the new matte paintings and seeing that it’s fairly easy to do. The only thing would be that because there’s so many of them it would be fairly expensive to produce all of them. Maybe something for another funding proposal… 

The reason there’s been a bit of a slow down in terms of our own practice is that the podcast is taking more and more time. It feels like every week it takes a little bit longer to prepare. Now that we’re doing longer episodes and have an Instagram which we post on every day it is becoming all-encompassing. Not that it’s not enjoyable – it’s great to be able to talk about things we’ve been looking at and even get to talk to some great people. An example being that this week we interviewed Grace Lee from the YouTube channel What’s So Great About That?. She’s someone I’ve following for some time now and I went back and rewatched all her videos which didn’t feel like a burden at all, quite the opposite! Perhaps it would be different if this was our source of income and we did our art on the side but it definitely feels like this potentially isn’t sustainable when life returns to normality. A day of researching, a day of recording and editing, and then writing all the Instagram posts, all while working 5 days a week…We’ll see! If you haven't heard of her then you really should check out her channel, they're beautiful video essays on all kinds of media. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3g8YdblbqlUAKEeAJbzMYw

Finishing some old works and continuing some new ones

Another week of quarantine means another week of making! I’ve made a scale test of the wall based sculpture of an empty plinth and the cast went well once I managed to get the silicone quantity right. I’ve cut out the footprint of Aphrodite of Knidos in thick paper to mask off those areas and ordered some patina-coloured paint that I plan to mix with water and spray over the model in order to give it that aged look. If it turns out to be too difficult we’ll have to reconsider the idea but we can hope! 

I’ve also made another matte painting which is ready to be painted. This one is Clair Noto's film The Tourist. Clair Noto wrote the screenplay and it’s like a darker, sex-charged Men in Black, in a secret alien world in Manhattan, including a secret alien club call the Corridor, where various aliens from all over the universe meet, have sex, and commiserate about being stuck on Earth. We decided to run with the corridor idea and made a new mock-up for a matte painting using a sci-fi style corridor. I feel like we need to do a slightly lighter one – the past two have been quite dark and sci-fi-y so I’m going to try and look more at scenes in greener environments. 

The reprint of the sprue model went really well and the work is finally complete! It’s been a year in the making so it’s great to see it done – also now that all the research and development out of the way the work isn’t too complex or expensive to produce. It’s definitely one of out more visually appealing pieces and will be making the rounds in terms of gifts to parents for birthdays and Christmas. 

Earlier in the week we thought we’d struck gold when trying to think of new examples of the tabletop tactic works. We were struggling to find examples of the scenes we wanted and I thought about all the times when characters in a film plan a heist or explain a plan with objects on a table. A good example is in Bend it like Beckham when the offside rule is explained using mustard and dressing. Quickly we amassed many examples of when the happens in films and TV; The Spanish Apartment (neurosurgeon explains brain using food), Wagons East (wagon master uses kitchen utensils to map of his course), Ni pour, ni contre (bien au contraire) (robbery planned in a restaurant), Max Manus (raid on a harbour planned with cigarette packets), Yes, Minister (political adviser explains downing street’s strategic worth with teacup and ashtray), it even happens in The Simpsons where the kids plan a strategy with the gun shop owner to defeat the bullies with water balloons, has a tabletop map with salt shakers and stones used to represent each faction. However, after thinking about it for some time we realised that we had moved away from the original idea that was all about movements that appear unintentional or natural in a film but are in fact highly planned and meticulous. This is not that and perhaps the research can be used in another piece but for this work it’s back to the drawing board. 

Finally, we’ve started doing some of the outlines of the fictional weapons to get cut out. Hopefully we can see these be made soon enough! Below are the The Noisy Cricket from Men in Black, Harry's Elder wand from Harry Potter, and the Master Sword from The Legend of Zelda.

First post in a year, new works currently in the making

OK so it’s been about a year since we we’ve properly invested time into this. It’s the first time in about 4 years that we’ve taken a break from writing and it was a combination of being swamped in other areas of our life and needing to reflect on why we do it and why it’s important. Even though we haven’t been writing, lots has happened and I so think instead of backtracking we’re just going to discuss what’s happening now (but also reference past events since some of these works have been long in the making). 

One of the new artworks we briefly mentioned a year ago was a Perspex box with Windolene covering the inside, the same dimensions as the stolen artwork Poppy Flowers by Van Gogh. That work has since been finished and so have two others! It looks just how we wanted it to and we’ll definitely be continuing the series. There’s a lovely thing about making artworks that can be given as gifts; really something enjoyable about it.

The sprue commission was also completed! The 3D model looks amazing and we’re now testing out getting it printed. Unfortunately the initial test didn’t go so well, with the model breaking in a couple of areas but we’ve assessed the damage and have redesigned the model so that when it’s printed again it should be much stronger! It’s going to be housed in a similar Perspex frame to the Windolene work and we’re in the process of cutting some foam for it to sit in. The intention is that it mimics some of the features of a collectable – often coins or mint condition toys are kept in such conditions. We were discussing this piece in the last blog post we wrote a year ago, so it’ll be great to finally see it completed. 

Researching custom foam inserts we found that the foam itself has a lovely aesthetic quality. The colours used, combined with the gaps left for objects really make them exciting objects in their own right. The missing objects also plays into invisibility and using one’s imagination to fill a gap (literally in this case) that we’ve intentionally left (a frequent theme of our practice). In terms of display, our idea is to cut the outlines of fictional weapons into the foam inserts and then house them inside a Perspex box like the sprue model. We went back with what we wanted to cut out of the foam – we thought maybe objects that get lost in films (hence they’re missing here) but we felt that weapons make more sense with respect to the foam (since weapons are usually kept in boxes of this nature. The fact that they’re fictional weapons is important because they’re missing and they’re missing because they never existed – they only existed in the reality of the film. In the same way that someone thought them up in the first place – viewers of the work are put into the same position. 

Another piece that evolved from something we were discussing last time about paintings from films. This has developed with research into old styles of matte paintings where people would physically paint backgrounds for specific shots in films. Some famous examples include the original Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones films. This is not the same as a flat backdrop but one step up and is similar to how they create digital environments in cinema today. Our idea is to create matte paintings for films that never got off the ground/were cancelled during production. The first example (below) we’ve got in the making at the moment is one for Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's film that was planned but got cancelled before production. The title we’ve chosen is Standard Fantasy Setting (Megalopolis Matte). This will eventually be a series with the title staying the same and the name of the film in the brackets changing. What we’re interested in with these matte paintings are that the area of black is completely open to interpretation; until that scene is put together it could be anything that goes into that hole. It’s the potential that’s exciting to us, similar to the area where the weapons are supposed to go in the foam inserts; invisibility creates potential. 

Next up we’ve got a piece which is about how inanimate objects in cinema have the ability to reflect the emotions of the scene they’re in. When people are sat round a table and they’re constantly grabbing their glasses and moving stuff on the table, the scene is quite frantic and most likely so is the conversation. If there is minimal movement in the room the scene is perhaps calmer, more calculated. A table top says a lot about the activity that happens that has happened around it, whether that’s a water ring stain from a glass or a cutting mark from a craft knife – every table-top tells a story. The piece we’ve conceived is that we recreate the table top from a specific scene, whether that’s wood or glass, and we map out the movement of the objects on top of it. The example below is from a clip in Layer Cake where the characters are discussing the next move after a violent incident. The finished work will be on glass to mirror the table from the original scene. We’re going to title the series ‘Tabletop Tactics’ with additional information in brackets, like the matte paintings. Perhaps a quote from the scene rather than the title of the film because it’s more about the scene as a standalone thing rather that the whole film. 

Finally, we’ve got another wall based sculpture on the go which is a plinth with a missing statue. This is only in the very beginning stages and will most likely take a long time but the idea came from a variety of interests; the first being the stolen Barbara Hepworth sculpture in Dulwich Park and the second seeing this plinth which has clear had a sculpture on it for white some time and then it’s been removed. It’s again about the invisibility bringing potential; not being able to achieve closure on something is what makes your mind think is more than just the single, obvious solution. We’re thinking about relating this to our other work about stolen paintings and having names after missing/stolen sculptures. The empty footprint/space will relate to the shape the missing sculpture would have taken up. We’ve just started making scale tests from jesmonite so we’ll see how that goes and if we can stomach making a big one. We’re going to title the series ‘Building from a smudge (Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles)’ the brackets again referring to the missing sculpture and the idea of building from a smudge I what the viewer will be doing; reimagining the sculpture from only a smudge. 

We’ve also got the Artists and Friends podcast back up and running which is fun! Give it a listen if you’re in need of some quarantine recommendations.