Week 1 - Encoding and Signs

Exercise on conveying words using expressive lines.

The following words I have chosen to interpret are:

Proud, Severe, Neurotic, Savage, Dynamic, Honest, Hostile and Anxious

My interpretations are straight forward as I wanted to approach the task with the simplicity of creating expressive lines that can visually describe the words as much as possible, though keeping it to a minimum. Words such as Hostile, Savage and Severe are generally easy to my understanding as these words convey the themes of frantic, chaos and frustration, which led to the decision to make the lines all frantic and chaotic, such as scribbling or crossing out. The other words I have chosen – Proud, Neurotic, Dynamic, Honest and Anxious are a little harder, and the expressive lines I had interpret each one can be questionable, because the lines are straight forward or curve in a bend, unlike the others that are more frantic which conveys the word more.

Compositions using stickers are fairly easy and did not have much trouble in visually presenting these compositions to convey the words. Each one are fairly straight forward and simplistic to the point where it visually communicates for each word. No hard thoughts were put into these as these compositions were my first initial ideas when I had read the words for the task to create. I did not want to overcomplicate the visuals and had used these stickers to the bare minimum as I can otherwise the piece will end up cluttered.

Creating abstract compositions using limited colour palette was somewhat hard and I chose the 4 phrases to help ease the creation of the abstract works. A calm morning. An uncomfortable silence. A loud conversation. A long day.

I used cool colours to suggest “A calm morning” and decided to play with the composition to create a scenery of the morning sun. It was slightly difficult since there can only be 4 colours to visualise the phrase so I decided to go for a simple approach of a scenery, otherwise I do not know how else I could describe the phrase.

For the “uncomfortable silence” I simply approached it by giving dark colours to represent the ‘silence’ and a red line to represent the “uncomfortable” part as a way to express that there is something stirring in the dark/quiet that gives off an uncomfortable vibe, as if there is a unknown presence.

“A loud conversation”. The composition was to use shapes that resembles a lightning bolt, as well as to create some sort of speech bubble to indicate a conversation, and use striking colours such as the yellow, red and white to convey the emotions of being loud. Using shapes helps to create the speech bubble-like thunder shape is probably the only effective outcome I could think of that can represent both ‘conversation’ and ‘loud’. 

“A long day” was given warm colours to represent the evening of the day, to express the relief and warmth of relaxation after the day of work or travel. A very simple approach using colours to create a scenery or a ‘horizon’ over the distance.

Chosen this piece by Edward Hopper “Openings” and to reflect the phrase “Nostalgia” by giving it some alterations that can somewhat reflect it. 

I chose to only alter the colours of the piece, as I believe colours can really influence/visualise a particular emotion or theme, regardless of what image it is. “Nostalgia” is actually a really hard word to break into using just colours, and this is the outcome of the alteration I had given the image with the theme of nostalgia. The colours of the blues and purples are to represent the dream-like quality to it and to feel otherworldly. The grainy feel is to indicate the ‘past’ like with all photos and videos that’s aged and the quality of them gets watered down as time went on. It’s really hard to try and convey the emotions of “nostalgia” and this is the only alteration I could think off that is able to showcase in my opinion, but overall I think something else could work better than this, but I struggle to figure out what it could be. 

Task 2

Analysis of one of Edward Hooper’s ‘Nighthawks’ painting.

Within the image it appears to be people in a lone American downtown diner late at night. There seems to be no narrative structure going on and the bleak, empty space around the diner, particularly outside, feels unnervingly empty, considering its suppose to take place at a busy road in downtown America. There doesn’t seem to be any messages that the image is trying to convey, although there might be a small narrative going on, depending where you are looking into. The couple, the lone customer and the person working there can potentially offer a small narrative individually and I think it’s mostly up to the viewer how they interpret/deconstruct the image as there is no solid ground of what is happening. There may be some subliminal messages with the image’s conceptual/symbolic visual of the scenery, but and I am finding it slightly difficult to pinpoint what it is trying to say. From my personal point of view on the image I think it’s more to do with the visual atmosphere that makes it interesting. The colours and the composition with the space and lighting somewhat makes this piece feel mysterious, yet eerily soothing at the same time. I feel like there might not be any narrative at all, and the painting is there for visual pleasing to the audience. I could be wrong, though this is what I interpret from this work.

Director - Stanley Kubrick.

I will be looking into Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for visual language and cinematography and apply its theme and messages by rearranging Edward Hooper’s “Nighthawks” painting by putting in subject matters from the film to see if there could be any potential impact on the image’s visual connotations by creating a quick rearrangement sketch of the same scene.

By adding one of the metaphors, the ‘monolith’, that represents the otherworldly and the mysteriousness, from Stanley Kubrick’s film into the visual imagery of Edward Hooper’s Nighthawk, there has been a significant impact in terms of narrative. Now we have an unknown subject matter in the scene, which creates a sense of mystery and unknown between it and the lone character in the diner. The loneliness feels more eerily uncomfortable as we see this unknown object looming over behind the lone man in this seemingly empty place gives off an otherworldly vibe.