Questions wisely asked during my presentation allowed me to realise that an influence carried over from 2008 is Mark Rothko who eliminated figurative content focussing only on colour, paint texture, canvas scale and shape and installation. Here's an example, Untitled 1953:
It's the sort of work that just makes me feel. And what I feel is what Freud and others called 'the ocean sublime', a sort of collective spirituality.
Here's a huge feature on the artist, his life and work from Washington: http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/
From admiting that influence I was able to recall that colour had an on-going importance to the vividness of the imagery of Plath. Maybe colour made Plath feel too?
I was also asked about scale, whether I imagined Brown Arc larger than this blog, perhaps projected on the side of a building like the truism texts of Jenny Holzer (see http://www.jennyholzer.com/list.php). I answered I was interested in scale, but possibly for the opposite reason - that sheer size alone does not necessarily equate to 'getting noticed' and I gave the example of 'an alien in a crowd': if an alien walked down a crowded Manhattan street, no one would bat an eye - we are so numbed by SFX that seeing the odd in the everyday we'd just take it as a SF nut off to a convention! Here's just such an example from Bobby Breidholt (for more see http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/User/Bobby%20Breidholt - I like his pattern and SF influences):
All this led me to wonder about my next assignment, a proposal for the artworks I'll hand in as my folio.
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