Giacometti at Tate Modern 10th June 2017
I visited this exhibition with a fellow OCA student and was blown away by it. Admittedly I was already a Giacometti fan, I have always been drawn to his very anatomical paintings executed in his moody, subdued palette. I have also admired (from afar) some of his rather iconic, tall thin sculptures of figures but have never seen any of them in life. The impact that both his painting and his sculptures have when standing in front of a huge collection is astonishing. I think this is possibly the first exhibition where I have understood what is means to dedicates your whole life to exploring and trying to understand a subject through art, in Giacometti’s case the human form, a subject that he admitted he would not understand in ‘a thousand years’.
I too am very interested in the human form, one of the reasons that I am drawn to Giacometti’s work. I went to the exhibition as it coincided with me reaching the part on painting the figure in my coursework. I was hoping to gain some inspiration for painting with lines. I was also interested to see portraits and sculptured busts side by side. One thing that my tutor has consistently reminded me to do so far is to ‘construct’ or ‘sculpt’ with paint. The context has been very much about my use of brush-strokes in painting, but I feel there is something to be gained from studying the works of an artist who moved seemingly effortlessly from 3D into 2D and back again.
Painting 1: Practice of Painting 