dianabercea

[dianabercea]

Final piece

[dianabercea]

Four types of prints for a whole society

[dianabercea]

More on the project

[dianabercea]

CHC essay review

Self-revelatory performance/story is the ideal intersection point of therapy and theatre. Out of all the creative arts therapy mediums, I have chosen the theatre area because it is a vague domain for me, it makes use of the process of storytelling and story creation and I wanted to explore it. The link between theatre therapy and arts and design practice is formed by the fact that both are focusing on discovering and developing the inner self, on expanding imagination and creativity. Moreover, the theatre therapy also contributes to expansion of self-awareness, compassion and interpersonal skills. My essay focuses on comparing and putting in contrast three similar, but in the same time different, applications of the theatre therapy: psychodrama, drama therapy and playback theatre. It will contain information on how people manage to cope with traumas and other personal issues by becoming connected to images and spontaneity. As stressed, spontaneity is a common attribute between the applications and it offers a better understanding of humanity and collective potential. There are also other elements they have in common, besides being branches of theatre therapy: storytelling, spontaneity, acting, creativity, inclusiveness. Psychodrama, drama therapy and playback theatre are experiences that can offer transformation and perhaps even healing, while eventually constructing attracting and touching acts. Not all the clients, who are looking forward to start drama therapy, suffer from a specific disorder or disturbance, in fact many people are looking at exploring their internal issues and a better understanding of themselves. It should be a normal step in our lives when we have the inclination to assess what is going on with us. Moreover, participants know they are in a safe place where others will listen to, accept and reflect over their stories, with total respect and without passing judgement.  If the heart of the story that is being told is captured with a high level of artistry, there will be another level of transformation and recovery.  The aim of this essay was to show the benefits of creative arts therapy, more specifically of theatre therapy through self-revelatory stories.  For the completion of the essay I did research many articles and a few books that I found online. Some of them are: “A Phenomenological Investigation of Creativity in Person Centered Expressive Therapy” - PhD dissertation by Mukti Khanna; “Blind review – melancholic psychodrama about identity” - article on The guardian;  Mind for better mental health (2018), “Arts and Creative Therapies” - article.

[dianabercea]

Update

The first image above depicts the final portrait that I have drawn on plywood. I have used charcoal for a defined outline, a small touch of oil pastels and a glue gun that contributes to the idea of not recognizing the inner self, therefore it gives the impression of something fake. It also allows the viewer to see the portrait as being “rotten”, as a rotten fruit. This is how I got to the second sketch above, the tree, which symbolizes the tree of life or perhaps mother nature (in a more extensive way). The portrait/head will hang from a branch just like a fruit, hanging there so then anyone can see him, an outsider. The character takes the role of a fruit that got putrid due to parasites (the third sketch) that are also human beings trying to destroy the tree step by step. I chose to draw a single fruit, the main character, because he is in the middle of attention in this story, he is the protagonist, the main focal point and in this way this part offers a zoomed in perspective into the whole. There is also a snail that has a chaotic clock on its spiral giving the impression of time passing slowly in a turbulent world as a result of having no joy in life, a routine. The reaching hand represents a branch of the tree that tries to alert the character that worse times are approaching. I am focusing on not filling the entire piece of wood with many details but to still have some that are spread around the whole area to capture the viewer’s attention and imagination. Mainly this story has its character in a desperate condition after being psychically hurt by the society and now he cannot find himself anywhere. He is exposed and vulnerable from every position and he constitutes a problem for the society that has to be disposed of because he is one in a few that communicate the truth about everything. Therefore, the feeling of an outsider, not integrating in society and the resulting presence of a “Rotten Psyche” (which will be the name of the piece).

[dianabercea]

Digging deeper: Dreams

Dreams are defined by vivid or memorable images, emotions and sensations that occur during different stages of sleep. Although the content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, they have been a huge topic in terms of science, psychology and religion interest throughout history. Many approve the Freudian theories about dreams - that they give insight into hidden desires and emotion, whereas others believe that dreams assist in memory formation, problem solving or simply are a product of random brain activation. Dreams play a substantial role in helping us cope with grief, stress and traumas. Most of our dreams are actually unpleasant; the most common emotions in dreams include fear, guilt, anxiety and helplessness. Moreover, anxiety dreams can be helpful – one theory is that we are working through our anxieties and more able to see what stresses us during the day. Dreams are an opportunity to work through things that frighten us in real life, to play out worst-case scenarios in an environment where they have no consequences. In order to get through the day, we have to edit out so much of what is going on around us, and if we pay attention to our subconscious and our dreams we get a different angle on our lives and issues. When we’re dreaming, we’re thinking in a state we never have access to by day. Dreams offer the opportunity to think in a different way and show new answers to problems, they often contain the seeds of something important.   The key themes that I thought of are: sleep, fiction, emotion, imagination. For further expansion I did word association: Sleep: calmness, rest(less), mattress, insomnia, REM, fatigue, eternal, disturbed Fiction: fake, utopian/dystopian, surrealism, supernatural, storytelling, speculative, mythic Emotion: anxiety, sadness, empathy, jealousy, hatred, overwhelming, passionate Imagination: originality, sensibility, idealism, contemplation, picturesque, stimulation.

Using the keywords above I have found some interesting articles: “Les yeux de W” at Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie” is an exhibition containing the work of the French artist Laura Lamiel, which takes the viewer’s body and mind on an inner journey through a succession of rooms through which one roams and crosses like the recesses of a memory that is sometimes vivid, sometimes buried, at times radiant, now gloomy. In this exhibition, the details act like the synapses of an infinite brain in which spaces fit squarely inside one another, getting divided, reflected and wrapped. The letter W’s dual and symmetrical structure indicates one way of approaching the journey. Laura Lamiel has been creating minimalist abstract landscapes that defeats our perception of reality in every possible way. By combining quirky deceptions, symmetries and plays of mirrors, Laura Lamiel’s sculptures, installations, photographs and drawings disrupt our perspective while causing new images to emerge. In a reality that seems to be constantly slipping away, Laura Lamiel’s work keeps the perspective tense and  radiates perception into the depths of an inner experience. The artist constructs each of her works with an unparalleled meticulousness, combining smooth and gritty, hot and cold materials. White enameled steel, plexi-glass and neon are combined with varnished wood, copper, incense granules, but also with fabric, paper and cotton. The exhibition presents cell structures at the scale of human body. These are work and thought spaces in which the artist has placed stripped-down forms, but also archives, gloves and tissues that seem to have traveled through time, their worn-out appearance obstructing the calm, silent organization of the works. Laura Lamiel gives a significant level of attention to these tiny objects and fragments of life, bringing every focal distance of the eyes into play. From the finest detail to the overall space, the artist invites us to look in every way possible, under, through or from behind, while bringing to the surface what we tend to neglect, treating blind spots as quintessential looking-spaces.

The anxious art of Liana Finck: the New York cartoonist posts on Instagram her observations of urban life and how its etiquette is breached. “I think it inspires my Instagram drawings because I use those mostly to figure out things that are bothering me and make sense of them.” Somewhat ironically, it’s those drawings that draw the most negative response on Instagram. Finck’s keen observation of human behavior reflects intense awareness – to the point of self-consciousness – of her own. She frames her work as “noticing how civilization works” – moments when the urban fabric is momentarily pulled tight. If you do not pay these trivial violations any mind, it may be because city living fosters a certain obliviousness, a thicker skin. But not everyone develops it. “Sometimes I feel like a person who notices these things in a world of blind people who don’t”.

Next, we have Tracey Emin with her own reassembled bed, from when she used to live in a council flat in Waterloo, exhibited in Tate Britain for the first time in 15 years. She describes her work, “My Bed”, as a portrait of a young woman.   It shows her real bed at the time in all its embarrassing glory, with used condoms, dirty underwear and empty bottles of alcohol strewn across the crumpled stained sheets. Emin had expressed her wish for the piece to go to a museum and described the Tate as “the natural home” for the work. Emin herself was very involved in how the work was to be presented, and it sits in a gallery alongside two Francis Bacon’s paintings, his 1951 Study of a Dog and his 1961 Reclining Woman, as well as six of her drawings that Emin gifted to the Tate to mark the occasion. Emin said part of the reason she had been so keen to have the work back at Tate Britain was to have a chance to change people’s original perceptions of the piece.“It’s really important to me to show it in context,” she said. “When I showed it originally at the Tate Britain as part of the Turner prize, nobody even bothered looking at the work that surrounded it, even though there were my watercolours, my drawings. So, what’s really great by having the Bacons around it, people will look at the Bacons and they will understand the connection with the bed and my other drawings. They will see the bed is art and that, with these incredible artworks around it, it is in good company.”  what would be the most suitable companions, and she was involved in selecting the paintings that would be shown alongside her work. Emin considered that Francis Bacon was a very immediate answer to the question of who would be the most suitable companion to have his/her art shown alongside Emin’s, because there are wonderful reference’s between their work. There is this sheer vitality of the body that moves in spaces combined with a sense of internal turmoil.

Valerio Nicolai, an Italian artist, has a series of works entitled “Amarena”, exhibited in Milan, which is dedicated to that particular moments when everything we thought we knew falls and certainties fall down, personal apocalypses perceived as absolute, moments in which our vision of the world alters and turns to red. The material he uses already contain its own story and his artworks emerge as the result of an exchange of questions and answers between the artist and his creation. The name “Amarena” might recall an idealized childhood, an eternal start of summer spent climbing trees to eat fruits, ice cream cones bought by grandparents, but it could easily be the name of a devastating climatic event, a typical storm originated off the Brazilian coasts. The red dominant of the works is the color of the stage Nicolai interposes between subjective and objective realities in contrast. The images above represent 2 of his works, “Toilette”(the red painting) and “II festeggiato” (the red sculpture).

“What does idealism get you today? Abuse, derision, or sometimes prison” The world is holding its breath and it's stifling. Ever since the financial crash, there's been a sense of stasis, of waiting to see what emerges. As the wait goes on, the feeling of possibility becomes more overwhelming. The comical slogan that appeared in the immediate wake of the crisis, "Keep calm and carry on", makes all right-thinking people want to go mad. But that's largely because people aren't just keeping calm. A common air of resignation has taken over. There's lots of protest on social networking sites, lots of declarations, petitions, information. Yet, this feels like converted people are preaching to each other, their ideas and beliefs only gaining traction when opponents resort to anonymous abuse and threats. Far from bringing people together, social networking sometimes seems only to reveal the depths of our division.

With “From Anxiety to Volition”, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld is showing the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Ludger Gerdes. With the beginnings of postmodernism in the late 1970s, Ludger Gerdes introduced a new communicativeness to sculpture and installation art—after Minimal and Concept Art. He dealt with architecture, nature and historical aesthetic concepts, as well as modernism, the public space and art’s relevance for society. His art is based on architectonic quotations, metaphors, abstractions and figurations, stagings, the pictorial quality of sculpture and word acrobatics. He assembled these recurring modules into models of thought and narratives whose structures or conclusions deliberately remain open. Models that show the world on a small scale, trees that symbolize the relationship between culture and nature, paintings that are sculptures,  words that fall out of everyday speech and a man wearing a top hat who views a painting in one moment and disappears the next.

The relationship between dreams and art is a strong one, having in common the idea that both can be either real or unreal. They complete each other replacing what it is with what might be and they are both exposed at different interpretations. Take, for instance, the extraordinary work of the 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who used the fantastical and the grotesque to explore morality and mortality, depicting scenes from his dreams and visions.

[dianabercea]

Tate Liverpool Brief

I have enjoyed the galleries in Tate Liverpool because I had the chance to see how other artists worked with materials and also because I was able to recognize a few artists from my earlier research during the year. I have gathered some interesting pieces of work which I have used to create a collage containing a fictional story based on facts that has an open end. I had to to work alone on this piece due to some group issues. The first image above represents the final piece, whereas the second one shows the path that the character follows during his journey; I have edited the path on my computer using a red line and three colored dots, more specifically, the red one represents the beginning, the green one, a state of mind, a break from the journey and the purple one, the end. The collage consists of the following art works: 1. “No VI/ Composition No. II” 1920 – Piet Mondrian 2. “Untitled (Study for Parallel of Life and Art) 1952 – Nigel Henderson 3. “Bottle and Fishes” 1910 – Georges Braque 4. “Pose work for plinths” 1971 – Bruce McLean 5. “Cossacks” 1910 – Wassily Kandinsky 6. “Northwest Drift” 1958 – Mark Tobey 7. “Still Life” 1925 – Fernand Leger 8. “Night Branch” 1994 – Alex Katz 9. “Road” 1998 – Alex Katz My work is called “Situation of a bewildered man” and it depicts the condition and state of mind of a character who tries to discover himself. The journey starts on the left bottom corner where the character contemplates on his life and the modern world. He is starring out the window. The background has a blurry appearance which I have connected to a blurry mind. I have cut small pieces from this work that belongs to Mark Tobey and put them beside the character until the end, showing different stages of confusion, that he carries around. Then he is seen in the second pose where the decision to take a new path is made. He ventured a long way through the road, when at a certain point he finds himself lost and falls into an area that is very new and strange at first sight, the modern art. He feels he is trapped in there because he has been living the entire life knowing only about conventional art. There is a picture next to him that was edited by me in order to give the impression of conceptual art, something he considers very “alien”-like. But later he encourages himself to take a shot and get back on the road of modern art. He covers a vast area of modern pieces. At the end he is still not sure if he will continue to follow the same road and if he will adapt to it, or he will come back to the old times where he felt the most secure and happy. This is an open ending, anything can happen.   I have also attached more detailed photos.

[dianabercea]

[dianabercea]

I have played with some improvised portraits in order to figure out my final one that will represent the main character, for which I have used charcoal and red acrylic paint. One interesting video that I have watched was about Francis Bacon’s life and practice, and what I have learned was that, in his works, he used to distort some parts of the human face while detailing others. It is said that eyes are the windows to the soul, but Bacon’s subjects had none, or had misplaced eyes. In my case, my subjects had both no eyes and misplaced eyes. Using this approach, the wholeness of personality disintegrates; and it integrates in my final piece fully. Having no eyes, the mouth was the next focal point that would be searched for, which is visible in the middle sketch above, a face full of emotion but devoid of identity. “The greatest art always returns you to the vulnerability of the human situation” (Hicks, 1989, p. 28). Here is another quote, from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology: “The distortion of art is not an expression of the destruction of the artist’s personality, rather the artist finds the unity of his artistic personality in destructiveness”. 

[dianabercea]

Idea generation

Earlier on my timeline I wrote about the cubism mind-mapping which helped me to find interesting words that I will further apply to my project, such as fragmented, multiple perspectives, disfigurement, distortion, severe. Then I started doing a bullet list with everything that came to my mind regarding the mediums I could adopt, after randomly watching videos and posts on social media platforms: canvas painting, sculptural painting, interactive storytelling construction, installation art, diorama, mechanical theater, automaton, and different materials, such as sand, nails, ink, graphite, resin, clay, plexi-glass, pastels. I also thought of illustrating idioms, literally, such as “the ice breaks under my feet”, “walk on eggshells”, “cost an arm and a leg”, “do something at the drop of a hat”, “a penny for your thoughts”, “don’t cry over split milk” etc. Later I thought of themes that would be appealing to the human eye: memories, social experience, identity, the body, time, globalization, traditions, personal issues. And I chose identity, a whole new theme for me. It is a really complex theme especially that all my work that I have gathered until this day depicts utopian scenes and nothing was related to my identity, as I want to show it in my actual piece.  Moreover, I have tried to use prepositional view in order to make the elements in the piece represent a part of my life and at the same time to appeal to the human eye, because, honestly, I find it really hard to represent something in today’s world without no one feeling offended by it. Anyways, I have put myself in the place of the character who will show my dominant impression of the modern world and I am trying to show it using symbolism that will be spread around the whole piece. Through this piece I want to show a familiar feeling that some people will find touching and others will approve. So it depends on whose interest will be served by my personal narrative. Now it will also depend on what people will understand of this piece, maybe they will get the message wrong, but behind it there is a story and stories are irresistible to human mind because they activate our imagination creating mental movies in our heads. Also, sometimes our inspiration comes from song lyrics, which happened to me while listening to “Mad world” by Gary Jules, when I managed to select bits of lyrics, for instance, “worn out places/faces”, “going nowhere”, “no expression”, “hide my head”, “people run in circles”, “the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had”, bits that helped me with my further development of the piece and research. 

[dianabercea]

Storytelling through art

Illustrations tell stories to engage the viewer and to disclose their meaning. I have found some interesting narrative techniques which helps the artist to make the work more interesting.  The first idea would be to look beyond the climax, the defining moment of the character, and to focus more on the fine distinctions throughout the entire narrative in order to explore them in the final illustration. Using symbols and details are important to the narrative as a whole. Then the artist is challenged to see from another perspective, a different scale and behavior of the characters.  Put emotion in motion to capture the viewer attention and feelings. For instance, if one decides to illustrate faceless character, one must express their feelings through exaggerated movement and actions. Moreover, creating an unreal reality would be another way to challenge the viewer’s imagination by presenting contradictions that appear possible, situations that make impossible look real. The observers’ attention is being captured and surprised when something is not the way they thought is was. Then, the message has to be sent to the audience, making them to put themselves in the place of the character, to live what the artist did when illustrating the narrative, even if it is about common experiences that both share or artist’s memories.  The main challenge represents creating a story, a strong one that is worth exploring and looking at, one that has all the ingredients: sense of emotion, background details, small events and symbols, rather than just a nice collection of shapes and faces. There also has to exist a protagonist at the center of everything, surrounded by emotions,events and themes. All the extra details will blend into the background. Through this character, the artist can make the audience wonder, making them ask questions, creating ambiguity; the character being either obvious or cryptic.  Details are also important, especially when one wants to capture the attention, one must find the perfect balance, putting the focal points all around the piece, not just in one area. The images above represent the work of David Wiesner, one of the most acclaimed picture book creators in the world. He creates three-dimensional models of objects he can't observe in real life, such as flying pigs and lizards standing upright, to add authenticity to his drawings. His work is known as Wordless Storytelling.

[dianabercea]

HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Hieronymus Bosch was a Dutch/Netherlandish draftsman and painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives populated with grotesque creatures and nightmarish scenes. It is now said that his art was made to teach moral and spiritual truths, and that the fantastical and hideous creatures from his paintings had a meaningful significance. Today we live in a society that is too urbanized and too much in a hurry that people do not slow down and meditate about spiritual expression. But if anyone is looking for a life changing experience or moment or even something that lasts longer, they should try art: “Visiting a major gallery is like entering a 21st century cathedral.”   There is little to know about Hieronymous Bosch, but his art was mainly based on ongoing existential human struggles which make me think that for his work he did research and study the human behavior, the fears, desires and beliefs, and everything that is related to social and religious ideologies. He managed to foresee the outcome of the modern world which is existent in his work, especially the contrast between holiness and corruption or wickedness which is a relevant subject in our days.    

[dianabercea]

FRANCIS BACON - A PASSION FOR MORBID SUBJECTS

Bacon is best known for his depictions of popes, crucifixions, and portraits of close friends. His abstracted figures are typically isolated in geometrical cages which give them vague three-dimensional depth, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds.  His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych “Three Studies For Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. Francis Bacon never hid his fascination with the art of the past. His love of the work of the old masters was personal, but he also believed that the study of their art should be a prerequisite for all contemporary painters. Bacon’s distortion of his subject was an essential element of his art. “I’m always hoping to deform people into appearance; I can’t paint them literally,” he said. Rembrandt offered Bacon a model of a reality altered through miraculous technique, where textured flesh and contrasts of light and shade are created by a rich, sombre palette and extravagant impasto.

[dianabercea]

KIM NOBLE - ARTIST WITH MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER

Kim Noble is a painter who lives in London and suffers from dissociative identity disorder. She has an uncertain number of identities that are all quite distinct, have their own names, ages and behaviors.  In an article from the Guardian was stated that there is a protocol when meeting Kim Noble. Amanda Mitchison, who took the interview, said: “you meet Patricia, the dominant personality among the many alter egos in Noble's head. With the help of regular support workers, Patricia looks after Aimee(her daughter) and makes sure there's milk in the fridge. It is Patricia who answers the door and welcomes me in.”  Her parents, stuck in an unhappy marriage, were factory workers, and the care of their daughter was farmed out to friends and local acquaintances. The details of what happened are hazy, but it seems that from an early age – somewhere between one and three – Kim suffered extreme and repeated abuse. And at this point her mind, traumatized beyond endurance, shattered into fragments, forming myriad separate identities. The breaks were clean: most of the principal personalities had no memories of abuse and no flashbacks. Thus she was protected from what had happened.  It would be very difficult or almost impossible for Kim to integrate in the world under only one identity because her brain has multiple paths. Her paintings are made by each of her personalities, some of even have violence as a theme, there are some paintings that no one would want to hang on their walls. Some paintings are abstract, some are more representational. The paintings of Ria Pratt, a very disturbed personality, are naive little cameos with whips and cages and wispy stick figures, with the children being raped or abused painted in lighter colors (example: the second photo shown above). 

[dianabercea]

The World project

For my project I have decided to approach the theme of identity; here it is not about gender, race, ethnicity or anything like this, it is about the inner self, the psyche. This idea actually came to mind when I did the research for the CCH module; my essay will consist of the concept of creative arts therapy which will focus on the theater area, self-revelatory stories/performances. Theater therapy helps a person to discover his/her inner self. For the final piece I will reflect an important and dominant part of my own personal story. Moreover, the work for Tate Liverpool brief inspired me to adopt this concept of confusion and rejection of adapting to the contemporary world. The following are some key words that can summarize my project: personal, inner self, informal, chaos, anxiety, violence, despair and storytelling. For achieving this final outcome, i will be using the following materials: a large piece of plywood, pyrography tool, glue gun, pastels, acrylics and modeling clay. Using these I want to represent the condition of a confused, fragmented, destroyed human constantly living with the impression of being an outsider in the modern and chaotic world. I could not find any artist that combined these materials, which is great, I still hope it is a unique idea.  I cannot really remember how I got to pyrography, but the last time I used it was 8-9 years ago and I really loved it. I could have build my own tool but I opted for a professional one because it has multiple tips that can be changed to achieve great shadings and outlines. Pyrography, or burning the wood, can be seen as burning or carving into skin (the plywood would be the skin) and the glue gun, which contains plastic glue, gave me the concept of fake, a fake person in a fake world. I am looking at showing images that evoke feelings of familiarity and informality. that will make the viewer to acknowledge himself within the whole picture. Further I will be looking at how to include the idea of multiple perspectives that I found interesting in the cubism research. Multiple perspectives, literally or metaphorically..?

[dianabercea]

CUBISM MIND-MAPPING

[dianabercea]

Cubism

Cubism, one of the most influential styles in the 20th century, was invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in around 1907. They brought different views of subjects(usually objects or figures), resulting in paintings that appeared abstracted and fragmented. The word “cubist” seems to have derived from a comment made by the critic Louis Vauxcelles who described some of Braque’s paintings as reducing everything to “to geometric outlines, to cubes”. It was the starting point for many later abstract styles such as constructivism and neo-plasticism. By breaking objects down into distinct areas the artists aimed to show different viewpoints at the same time and within the same space and so suggest the three dimensional form. They also emphasized the two dimensional flatness of the canvas, instead of creating the illusion of depth.  I created a mind-map based on cubism and some of the words that I found interesting are: fragmented, multiple perspectives, disfigurement, distortion, severe. I had a look on the most common themes in this style: nude figures, still life and landscapes. But Picasso’s themes were actually more profound; he had a violent approach on his art, that brought us sobbing emotions, children, musicians, blind people etc. The aim of this style is to show things as they really are, not just to show how they look like.