I've got a real thing for materials, materiality and textures - and I love how these (rather general) concepts can be explored on a flat plane. Painting and photography have a lot in common, and while the internet continues to establish itself as (probably) the most important platform for aesthetic and visual discovery, we're all going back to flat. What I mean by this is that what we see on a computer screen does not have a texture: it stands as a flat image. Despite this, an understanding of lighting, texture and movement can still be achieved. A few weeks ago, my friend Will and I took some photographs of the inner, reflective surface of a photography lighting umbrella. Placed in a totally white studio (a shelf space painted white on all sides), we added some different coloured cards to change the appearance of the otherwise silver material, and the results are stunning.
Along the same lines, I recently came across these incredible paintings by artist
Yrjö Edelmann. His magic conjurings of trompe-l'oeil images are deceptively placed in a realm somewhere between reality and fantasty - but the images of his work look incredible on a computer screen. The evident textures aren't entirely dissimilar to the images of some shiny material that we produced, and of course, both share a very particular flatness in contrast to their textures.
