Evaluation of Abigail's World

The intention of my collage was to explore the work of Andrew Wyeth and to experiment with what I euphemistically call ‘Flat Art’. As an art student who works almost purely in sculpture and what is loosely referred to as ‘Assemblage’ I rarely branch out into flatter mediums. To create a genuine interpretation of Wyeth’s work I created a collage using coloured paper and cuttings from magazines and books. My work shares several compositional features with Wyeth’s work ‘Christina’s World’ I also replicated his work by choosing an image which puts the viewer behind the subject meaning that they see what the subject sees. I placed the subject (I named her Abigail) in the foreground and used an empty background and midground to depict the meaning of my work. In wanted to create a visualisation of loneliness in a big city so I emptied out the scene by leaving out some aspects of the picture. By making Abigail the only person and by replicating her relaxed but distance posture I created an emotive picture similar enough to Wyeth to replicate his style but distant enough to make it personal. Through my research into Wyeth’s work and my critical analysis of ‘Christina’s World’ I picked up on subtleties in the work which made it effective and emotive, all in all the theory behind the work is very good but the execution could have been better. I've learnt from this experience that there's worse things than flat art, my creation of this piece was laborious and the final result reflects this, if I decide to do more collages later in the project I’m confident the would be technically improved. I learned or rather I practised two major techniques in this study: I explored leaving some elements out of an interpretation of a picture and how effective this can be in creating a mood. Also I practised creating a collage by starting at the back and layering forward until I reach the foreground, for this collage I began with the buildings in the background and finished by making Abigail. Collages are intriguing because they begin with the less important features and finish with the most important, this tends to be the reverse of how I work in sculpture, learning to think ahead is definitely valuable. My next step will be more artist studies and evaluation followed by design ideas.