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Graffiti Bridge (2003) Acrylic on canvas, 30.5x30.5cm Private collection This painting came about through taking a series of photographs for a different project; looking at the pictures when they had been developed, I decided that one side of the photograph that this is painted from would make for an interesting composition. The desire of the viewer is frustrated by the framing. The graffiti is cropped so completely as to allow only a tantalising fragment of the piece, whilst the wall it is painted on obscures the houses behind, of which the chimneys and attic windows form a horizon punctured by the tower block. The whole composition serves to deny the eye's entry into the pictoral space, an antithetical position with regards to historical landscape, but a motif employed by Caspar David Friedrich in some of his works, where landscape becomes the obstruction of view. Here it is not so much the obstruction of view, but more the failure to construct a view from the compositional elements, which, instead, seem to stack upon each other almost arbitrarily. ©copyright 2005 Nicholas Middleton |
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