Bringing forward my interest in the area of human experience, painting as a language explaining the nonverbal containment, and painting in relationship with poetry as a time art.
Before writing about critical reflection, I came across the presentation of the author of How to Write About Contemporary Art by Gilda Williams at Garage Book Fair Gallery Night. Introducing myself towards writing about art as an artist, about critical reflection, and more. I asked myself how do I write, what to include, and why I write. I love writing, the process of writing along, thinking, writing the thoughts, and the writing brings along with the thoughts. At the same time, I found it hard to find a certain position of writing through critical reflection. In the later part of my writing process, I found that questioning plays an important role in my research. So does it happen in my art practice.
The experience of human beings can be managed and understood in certain layers of sense. The most common connection with our experience in life shall be the sensories we have, like smell, vision, sound, touch. These are physical interactions with objects and surroundings, and most of them could be simply verbally described for what we engaged with. Therefore it is easy for us to translate our physical experience to others, as we simply have a common sense or knowledge of different descriptions, just like the color of red and the smell of flowers. It is simply related to our knowledge of “red” or our previous experience of smelling a flower.
Pictorial Experience and Seeing by NEWALL, M., 2009 describes seeing in a physical and in-depth way. I tried to understand the basic logic from the surface before getting into the meaning of the image. In which he mentioned veridical and non-veridical seeing through our visual experience ( which I will further explain in the Context section).
I moved on from the theory he explained into the pictorial experience when we come across the understanding of space and transferring it into painting. Starting with seeing the surface, which is veridical seeing, for objects that come across in my vision. It can be summarised in a form, it is a surface of color, a reflection of light to be precise. Every part of the space is made up of surfaces of color, and that is what we purely see in reality, before adding any understanding to the place.
The Difference between vertical and non-veridical is obvious (I included more of the description in the context part). Meanwhile, it can happen at the same time when we experience through a painting, the paint on the surface and the subject matter depicted. The relation between material and ideas from the creator creates an experience and energy contained inside the painting.
On the other side, this brings out the ability of paint, the experience it carries, translates, and expands.
Sammi Mak, 2021, The Study of seeing, size various 5 x7 cm, Oil, pastels, and ink on canvas
Sammi Mak, 2021, The Study of seeing, size various 5 x7 cm, Oil, pastels, and ink on canvas
Sammi Mak, 2021, The Study of seeing, size various 5 x7 cm, Oil, pastels, and ink on canvas
I did a set of practices that corresponds to my understanding of seeing, questioning the difference between the veridical and non-veridical ways of seeing. I used a small cut-out canvas with green ground. These are the depictions in life that I tried to separate my understanding of objects or the understanding of the land. They all appear equally, as lines and colors in my vision. Instead of buildings or the leaves from autumn. In some of the pieces, I applied a large area of painting without any other recognition of the matter I am depicting. I realised the space inside is rather large when I focus on looking into the paint on such a small canvas ( most of them are around 5 x 7 cm).
Sammi Mak, 2021, The Study of seeing, size various 5 x7 cm, Oil, pastels, and ink on canvas
It is a purified vision, I addressed to myself.
This brought me to think about the space in colour and the phenomenon of seeing the enlarged feeling of space on a directed ground.
They acted as a metaphoric bridge from the abstracted “no-place” of the earlier paintings with the character drawings into the more tangible, monumental, and recognizable world inhabit, historicize, and politicize
Zegher, M. and Golden, T., 2007. Julie Mehretu. New York, N.Y.: Rizzoli International Publications.