The Grand Tour, A Contemporary Take.
Solo travelling and backpacking has been a transformative experience for me. Following the isolation we all felt during the Covid years, I went backpacking through Europe during the winter break 2024. I only took a sketchbook, a 50mm DSLR and a reusable film camera. During the last couple of years, I have evolved into a photography and oil painting artist over the course of my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
My art practice consists in the conversation that happens between painting photography as a travelling artist. The title of my works is called The Grand Tour, A Contemporary Take. I think of myself as a contemporary impressionist, basing my practice in the act of taking images of places, people and moments, then translating those into paint.
The term ‘Artourist’ first utilised by Leonor Antunes, refers to the traveller who creates art while on their journey. I like the idea that photography can be both a means to an end, so it is the starting point of many works, although it can also a finished product itself.
There are many factors that drove me to make work about travelling and tourism. I’m interested in the interactions of people in the space – what attracts people to the sights?
I am largely interested in the social study of tourism and memory, specifically, how people experience spaces and landscapes and why people feel the need to take photographs of every location. My favourite subject to take photos of are buildings in towns or cities, especially if I can find a street or an archway to frame the shot. I like to think of my photographs not only as research, but as memory stores, whereas I consider my paintings an imagined setting or the impressions of the memory of that place. I enjoy embellishing my paintings with saturated colours and textures made with paint – I think of this process as what happens when you try to think of a memory too many times, where it starts to shift, and details become blurred with recollection.
The mediums I use are canvas boards, sketched in pencil, covered with two layers of orange acrylic paint and then oil paint, straight out of the tube. I choose to not mix the paint with mediums, as I love the impressionists’ thick application of paint and I am inspired to make works based on these aesthetic choices.
In my current collection of postcard works, I use a bright orange acrylic paint base for every painting and the canvas board size stays the same for every piece in the series.
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