The Stanley And Audrey Burton Gallery

Today we visited the gallery which is in the Parkinson building (which I had no idea was in there) to look at the art in terms of what appealed to us and also considering curation. The most memorable image to me was a self portrait done by Gyorgy Gordon in 1974. It was a self portrait on a blue ground with his portrait as a relatively small portion at the bottom of the canvas and lots of negative space around it. I think it was the weirdness of this images balance that struck me the most, and the moody colours it had been done in. It didn't look so much like a self portrait at first as it did a blob of clay at the bottom of the canvas. From this gallery visit I've definitely seen that at least at the moment images with a lot of negative space on them are drawing my focus, I'm not sure what this says about me? But I think the conformist way I was taught art at school is set off by it and something in my head says "BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE TO USE EVERY PART OF THE CANVAS SURELY?!". However more and more recently I am seeing that this isn't always true, if the image you are creating would benefit compositionally by having a lot of blank space and if it helps you to communicate what you're trying to communicate then why should you fill the whole canvas? 


Whilst I can appreciate that I don't do fine art, and that the exhibition today was showing mainly paintings which would fit into that category, now I've started on the illustration course I feel able to look at fine art in a new light. Where before I couldn't understand why some of it was there and what it meant, I can now take elements such as good composition or use of line from an image, and see what purpose this serves in the context of the painting. I can see that images with a lot of negative space draw my eye because its not the norm, and that they look jarring and confusing but maybe that's what the artist wants. Maybe they wanted to portray the feeling of being uncomfortable or oppressed so they chose to use a domineering colour like the blue in the self portrait to outweigh the colours used on the face. I can see that and now I can begin to relate it to how I could go about using those methods of image making in my own practise, even if I'm not painting massive canvasses.