Further thoughts on Colour Field Painters: Franco Fontana

In my post regarding the work of Frank Bowling and colour field painters, I referred to this image which I had made in Spain before starting this course.

At the time I made that image I had seen the work of a landscape photographer whose name I have been unable to remember and whose work I have unsuccessfully tried to research. However having recently looked at the learning log of another student, I found reference to the photographer, Franco Fontana, and have realised this is the photographer whose work I had seen and which influenced this image.

Images such as these he made in Italy show strong abstract-like landscapes with large blocks of vivid colour. The result is very similar to the images made by the colour field painters I have referred to previously.

During my trip to Spain I made a number of images in response to this idea.

“All things bright and beautiful” The Times 31 May 2019
A review of a retrospective of the work of Frank Bowling at Tate Britain.

“Frank Bowling is a Guyana-born British artist. His paintings relate to abstract expressionism, color field painting and lyrical abstraction” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bowling Accessed 31/05/2019

I have previously indicated that I am unfamiliar with styles and practitioners of abstract art and so read this article to further my knowledge. I noted that Bowling is described in his Wikipedia entry as practicing “color field painting”. Researching this a little I read that “The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/colour-field-painting Accessed 31/05/2019

An example of this is this work by Martin Rothko

Retrospectively I think it was this style of having bold blocks of colour which I was trying to emulate in this landscape image from a few years ago.

The Times article describes a painting by Bowling, Moby Dick.

“Moby Dick, painted in 1981, couldn’t be more like an underwater scene;”

“Bowling also began to enjoy the unexpected effects his paintings had on the viewer. He welcomed the interpretations and responses, though they had nothing to do with his own intentions, which were entirely formal. It is nice to know this because it frees the viewer to allow their imagination run with what could otherwise be rather opaque images.”

This painting is to me reminiscent of encrustations on the rocks underwater, the colours likewise are those of some underwater scenes.

It reminds me of scenes like this:

This made me consider incorporating this influence into my depictions of underwater objects for my “Collections” assignment.

I was directed to this book by my tutor as an introduction to the course.

It is a series of essays by the American photographer and writer Robert Adams published between 1981 and 1994. The cover notes say

“His subjects vary, but again he questions accepted prejudice, this time not only the view that art is trivial but that artists are separate. He demonstrates that many understand themselves to be bound to the world by complex and important obligations.”

I read the book from cover to cover as I would a novel. I believe I have learned a number of things from it.

What I did not learn was very much about the style and methods of the photographers discussed. However, the  writing introduced a number of photographers with whose work I am not familiar. The book is sparsely illustrated with examples of their work, so I think I must look elsewhere to get a better understanding of their styles.

The writings did however examine the context in which the photographers were working. Adams attempted to describe their motivations and drives, although this is largely by inference as the photographers themselves do not in general give any account of this. I found the chapter “Writing” expressed this well.

“Photographers are like other artists too n being reticent because they are afraid that self-analysis will get in the way of making more art….

The main reason that artists don’t willingly describe or explain what they produce is, however, that the minute they do so they’ve admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not, in the opinion of some at least, fully there in the picture.”

For this reason, I think that what the writing is telling me about is Robert Adams’s own motivations and reasons for his photography. As he himself acknowledges:

“Probably the best way to know what photographers think about their work, beyond consulting the internal evidence in that work, is to read or listen to what they say about pictures made by colleagues…”

There are many other points that I gained from reading this book. One of the challenges facing me is to understand the framing techniques used by Paul Strand in his work “Time in New England”. Adams describes “Church, Vermont 1944” as “among the greatest architectural pictures ever made”. The edge of a symmetrical building is cut off the image, and in other images he off-centres or includes large areas of apparently irrelevant framing.

I think I must re-read this section and find more of the images from this series. It is helping me to begin to understand the issues addresses in Exercise 1.4 Frame.