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Ingrid Andersen |
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Fernando Do Campo – Two Self-Portraits?
I have been seriously studying painting for some time now, and interestingly have not painted a portrait for a couple of years. Reasons for this may be many, but primarily I think it is due to my interest in the power of painting to discuss my own mood, thoughts and creative energy as a whole. As such, my work of late is mainly abstract. Abstract painting allows me to continue my questioning of paint as a viable medium while aesthetically and visually representing the things about my practice that hold me: colour, pattern, line, pictorial play, surface. I have found the questioning of paint and of my relationship with it the most sustaining. Hence, when I sat down to paint a self-portrait I found myself requestioning the idea of portraiture as a visual self-representation of the artist and realised that a Fernandoesque abstract painting, with my interest in complementary colour relationships, patterning, layering of forms and shapes, hard-edge and organic spatial shifting – all these visual tools portray my charisma, my hybrid, loud, cultural self rnore than a face. So I offer the conversation. Two Self-Portraits? Fernando’s face with a painting or Fernando’s painting with a face? This triggers the dialectic that exists between an artist and his practice. On one side you have a representation of the artist through his work, on the other a self-representation of his conventional portrait. Are there two portraits or one? Are they one and the same?
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