The curious revisit of pigments and pixels _ part of the PAINTED IMG_# … series (works in process)
Yolanda is a professional photographer and visual artist. In her own artwork, she photographs the land from her slowly moving car, then manipulates the images digitally via Photoshop. These images are further extended as visual source for her paintings.
The first step of this process has resulted digital prints, which may be seen in Yolanda’s 2013 outoftheCUBE exhibition,
Karoo bit.mapped – which also features an artist’s interview.
Yolanda revisited the Karoo to take more photographs, which again she digitally manipulated. The second stage in her working process has been to paint these digitally engineered images with all their blurring and defects, to build up a formal landscape. Here a selection of them has been presented as one long horizontal line, mimicking a horizon. They do not necessarily ‘lead into’ each other, and each has the sense of being an individual pixel.
As a painter, one artist’s work that fascinates Yolanda is that of the English Romantic landscape painter, J M W Turner (1775 – 1851). It is interesting how Turner spent months on trips, sketching prolifically in pencil and paint ‘on site’, to capture perspective and true colour; but returned to his studio to create his impressionistic oil paintings, using the sketches as sources. His became known as ‘the painter of light’; but unlike the true Impressionists who were exploring optical phenomenon, Turner’s concern with light had to do with the spiritual in terms of the sublime and God’s power in nature, and his lack of foreground detail related to his desire not to introduce visual distractions.
Coincidentally, Yolanda’s working process is a contemporary version of this in reverse – sketching source via ‘photographing in motion’, then returning to her studio to manipulate these already blurred images digitally on Photoshop. Finally, she creates oil paintings of these digital images, faithfully reproducing each blur. In the Karoo bit.mapped exhibition interview, I asked her this question:
What significance does the Karoo have for you?
The fact that it can be so many different things at the same time. It can mean everything or nothing to a person. Viewing a picture perfect “touristy” image of the Karoo can surely sell you every romantic notion in the book – but try and inhabit it, experience it for real? You are surely in for a surprise. That very beautiful landscape can just as easily confront you, even turn on you, with its harshness and emptiness. In my opinion you cannot experience it by taking a perfect, well-composed photo – you cannot ‘frame’ it.
Through various technical manipulations of a conventional subject matter, Yolanda’s resulting artworks represent an exploration of the creative possibilities inherent when shifting back and forth between traditional and new media.
Yolanda Warnich has a BVA degree from the University of South Africa.
These works form part of her creative and technical exploration, and are not available for sale.