China painting has become a tradition within my family that not many artist practice anymore. My grandmother taught my mom how to china paint and my mom later showed me how to China paint. I included my mother in this photograph from the library of congress with another China painter. My concept was to showcase the deep historical roots this art form has in general and within my family. I wanted to highlight how this art form is becoming more scarce and how this delicate form of art is very intricate and historical.
This piece by Ashley Dinning depicts two women sitting at a table, one appearing to be drawing in a notebook, and the other painting a dish on a stand. The composition is weighted diagonally, with the image being heaviest on the right side overall. The line of the painting woman’s arm matching the angle of the notebook creates a delineation between the focus of the image and the negative space of the empty table in the bottom left corner. There is also a hierarchy of scale between the woman with the notebook and the painting woman, as the painting woman takes up much more of the frame and is much larger. This gives the painting woman a higher degree of importance in the image, but this is slightly disrupted but the high contrast of the other woman’s stripey shirt. The lowered contrast of most of the image and the weathering creates a softness that aids in that vintage photograph look.
ReplyDeleteThis piece presents a scene of two women who appear to be doing an activity together, possibly for work or as a way of just spending time together. Perhaps the woman further from the camera is drafting a design for the other woman to paint on the dish. There is some anachronism in the way that the two women are dressed, with one wearing much more modern clothing compared to the other. This could be interpreted as a nod to traditions and generational knowledge. Alternately, one could view it as a commentary on how an art form might change or evolve, but the artistic inclination and want to create is still passed down through time.
I find the subject matter compelling and the possible metaphors easy to follow. I think the imagery chosen is particularly strong at conveying the message – both the Library of Congress image and the image of the modern woman. I feel, however, that more could have been down to push the techniques and overall composition further. Much of the image is unaltered from the original Library of Congress photograph, with the only alteration in the subject being the removal of a vase and the addition of the modern woman. The image’s frame remains almost completely the same. The primary issue with the technique, I find, is that the exposure of the image is inconsistent with that of a wet-plate collodion process image. To improve this, I believe that the modern woman would need to be much more blurred and out of focus than the painting woman, as she is considerably further from the camera. Her drawing hand especially needs motion blur to look convincing, and the contrast of the stripes on her shirt seem much higher than her surroundings. The weathering and color grading on the image is a nice touch, but I wish that the contrast was just a bit lower and the black shades in the image (not the frame) leaned greyer.
Overall, I really enjoy the subject matter and subject composition of this image. I like the story that it seems to be telling and the anachronism between the two women and how that makes me think about what the artist is conveying. I just wish that more had been done to make the image more distinct from the original and really push the idea of a wet plate collodion image.