NEW LENSES: Experimental Capture and Release

Spring 2022

Composite Painting by Simon Bayona

For my final project in this unit, I thought I would try to do something similar to the type of work that Kensuke Koike does but do it through photoshop instead of doing it physically. I started by trying to figure out how I would separate the images out. I used Starry Night because it was the first image I could think of.

I went with this pattern of removing things because I love it when patterns grow rather than repeat themselves. At this point, I thought about different ways of removing parts of Starry Night to see how much I could remove and regroup while maintaining its recognizability.
While this looks cool and you can for sure tell it’s Starry Night, I thought that it might be more interesting to continue to subtract by adding. But what to add?
So … this looks dope. Amazing! At this point, part of my brain began to think about how to create or tell a story from here either continuing to use famous paintings or going in a different direction. I thought about how the fact that they blend together was an interesting way to juxtapose two images. I also thought about how certain images become ingrained in our brains to the point where a passing reference makes our brain fill in the blanks. It would be hard to do both at once so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. During that time, the devil on my shoulder also known as the other part of my brain looked at this image and was bothered by all the empty space and kept saying, “MORE PAINTINGS”. After a lot of thought, I decided which way to go.
at this point it’s too late to go back … it looks too cool
so worth

I love this for so many reasons. Even at a passing glance, at least three of the paintings in there are easily identifiable. Each one dominates its part of the picture without completely taking away from the others. Each one also has its corner where it isn’t present at all. There is a really cool X that forms in the middle where all of them mix up that looks so cool.

So what’s the story here? I’m still not sure. I think that it definitely shows the fact that all of these paintings are super recognizable. I tried to pick some paintings from different areas of the world but there just aren’t as many incredibly recognizable landscape paintings from places other than Europe. Either way I think it looks really nice.

simbayona

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