Use your reading list and other sources to find contemporary artist who work with landscape and a range of viewpoints and compare their approaches with those of earlier artist.
Tacita Dean is a British visual artists who lives and works in Berlin. She is best known for her work in 16 mm film, photography and drawing. Her series of six multi-panel blackboard drawings ‘Fatigues’ from 2012 showing the peaks of magnificent mountains of Afganistan.
Georges Seurat was a French post-Impressionist painter. He developed pointillism technique with Paul Signac. His drawing ‘Landscape with houses’ from 1881 was made with conte crayon.
- For me, the most obvious difference sits in the feelings awakened due to different technics and medium. The realistic, sharp contrast of black and white on Dean’s picture giving a sense of keeping distance from a viewer, quite cold and Seurat’s drawing kind of warmly luring us closer to the houses like you are in a dream – so much more intimate – as a result of his chosen technique.
- The other significant difference is between the choice of the subject: natural and man-made.
- Both artist used black and white only, the foregrounds remained black on both pictures, however on Dean’s image the black sky contrasts the white mountains and on the second one the sky is rather light-toned.
As mentioned above, both are monochromic and very still. The presence of houses normally indicate a sign of human or any life but to me both of them seem to be uninhabited places.
LaraDraw 