Urban Spaces 2

As part of our Urban Spaces project, this piece of work involves using a classical painting of our choice from the National Gallery collection as a starting point to create a concept for a very different piece made in response to the original.  We don’t need to get as a far as making it (yet).  It’s to teach ourselves about the process of creating an artwork.

I’ve chosen Pissarro’s “The Boulevard Montmartre at Night” 1897

I felt this painting as:

Light pouring, tinkling, shining, reflections, spaces defined by light/shadow/colour

Water, river city as a river

Nature silhouetted and corralled

Celebration

Cars looking benign, space and air

Patterns, repetitions, things moving at different speeds

Idea:

To look at the city made up of buildings, places, areas planned and built, but  planned and never built.

To explore what is in our control and out of our control in the swirl of a city?

To play with the idea of areas constantly occupied, abandoned, occupied and abandoned in building layers

Built on rivers, like flowing rivers, history, it’s all temporary

Proposed Piece:

To use light shadow colour texture and form and sound to show the ever-changing flux of urban spaces, how moods, feels, uses can change from one time to another.

   

The people who come to view the piece will be the architects of this change by being able to physically move the light sources to control where the shadows and light areas fall, and explore how this affects the piece.

Imagine the core of the work will be made of simple shapes, boxes, textures, patterns.  I've realised I need to do more drawing get size, shape

See it displayed as part of an entire dark room, with shadows, and thrown from the centre onto the outer walls.  How does the size, shape, strength of the light affect this, plus size of the objects being lit?

??Not sure about this, but is there a way could get inside the piece and project this onto the walls?

??Investigate the optical illusion element

To accompany the piece I would like a changing sound-scape of layered sounds playing – could I move the sets of sounds around the central space so that different areas get interchanging sets of sounds?  Sounds a mix of what is going on now in cities, and nature, sea sounds.  I've done some recordings with variable success in London, and in Canterbury.  There's an telling contrast between a street with traffic and one that has been pedestrianised.

Well here I go, leaping out of my comfort zone!