Does Repetition Increase Or Dilute Meaning ?

Repetition does increase meaning because of the impact the installation or painting or drawing it had. For an example David Connearn, in his work one line is repeated it them becomes something else as it creates a whole different look on the paper. It’s all about the impact. The impact affects the viewer. As once he has finished he has lost own ship of it and its down to the viewer if it makes a statement to them as he has just created it because he likes the process of doing it and repeating the lines. It’s like Kusama's work she uses repetition to create dots which is like therapy to her mental illness it’s almost like OCD. They both do this process to help themselves not just to create artwork for other people to see.

Kusama finds solace in drawing dots and repeating patterns. Producing art pieces in dots is a repetition in itself. Then for Damien Hirst he repeats the theme of death which gives his work more meaning because you already know some of his other stuff as he is world famous and he creates work to help him deal with the idea we are all going to die soon. However it’s almost like he is attention seeking because he loves to be in the spot light and to have to craziest ideas and to sell them for millions of pounds then on the other hand Kusama and David create their pieces of art because it helps them deal with their lives with David doing because he likes creating art and Kusama to help her deal with her mental illness. 

Each artist uses repetition in a different way to create meaning. I find that the use of repetition does make a bigger impact on the meaning because it’s making more of a bigger statement on the viewer. The bigger the impact on the viewer the more they are going to try and find the meaning of why the artist has created the artwork. 

Damien Hirst Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is an English artist, entrepreneur and art collector and he is the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists these dominated the art scene in Britain during the 1990s. He is internationally renowned and is reportedly Britain's richest living artist, with his wealth valved at £215 million in 2010. 

Death is a central theme in Hirst's work he repeats this theme threw out his artwork. He became famous for a series of artwork in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are preserved- sometimes having been dissected- in formaldehyde. The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, a 14 foot (4.3m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a virtrine ( clear display case) became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s.

He was arrested on two occasions for shoplifting. However Hirst sees his mother as someone who would not tolerate rebellion: she cut up his bondage trousers and heated one of his Sex Pistols vinyl records on the cooker to turn it into a fruit bowl or a plant pot. She did though encourage his liking for drawing which was his only successful educational subject. 

Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Damien Hirst- I've always liked series I remember looking at Robert Motherwells paintings when i was young. Do you know 'splashes by the sea?' I thought it was great. You get some sort of security from the repetition of a series if you say something twice, it’s pretty convincing. Its more convincing than if you say it once. 

One of Hirsts famous pieces was For the love of God (2007) which was a skull coved in diamonds. the reasons why I like this piece of art work is because of the process he has done by coving the skull in diamonds. My view on this piece is that it’s all to do with the value of life and how people take life for granted. For the love of God (2007) is a sculpture and it consists of platinum cast of an 18th century human skull encrusted with 8,601 flawless diamonds including a pear-shaped pink diamond located in the forehead that is known as the skull star diamond. The skull's teeth are original. 

The artwork is a memento mori, Latin for 'remember your mortality' or 'remember you must die' this referring to a genre of artwork that vary widely but share the same purpose: to remind people of their mortality, an artistic theme dating back to antiquity.

In 2007, art historian Rudi Fuchs observed: 'the skull is out of this world, celestial almost. It proclaims victory over decay. At the same time it represents death as something infinitely more relentless. Compared to the tearful sadness of a vanities scene, the diamond skull is glory itself.' 

The skull coasting £14 million to produce. Then an asking price to sell at of £50 million. This would have been the highest price ever paid for a single work by a living artist. 

With all this information about Damien Hirst I have come to an understanding that he doesn’t repeat a process   in his work like some of the other artist I have looked at like Bridget Riley. Hirst repeats the theme of Death by creating new things we he thinks have a link to death. Like what Damien says he get some sort of security from repeating a series and his art work is his series and his series is about the theme death not about the process of how it’s made. 

David Connearn

David Connearn uses repetition in the huge drawings he is best known for. 'Drawnonward' (2001) ink on paper uses repeating lines. When looking at this work I just see an obsession with repeating lines pattern. This is one of the reasons why I like repetition because of the obsession an artist has in their work like David Connearn has. the bigger the mass the more the impact it has with repeating the line this is what is happening in David Connearn's work. The paper has a line repeated in black ink with the trend of following where the last line has been to create this artwork.

David Connearn's work is rooted in a reductive drawing approach in which he starts drawing a freehand horizontal line. Below that he draws a second line, trying to exactly match the first line. He then repeats this process to a determined size. The resultant works have a variety of visual echoes: rock strata, aerials views of the ocean or the close weave of cloth. Yet the work is resolutely 'about' nothing; it does not seek to represent anything but its own making. The fastidious line making is a material artefact of the time, conditions and temperament, which brought it into being.

This lack of meaning and painstaking process creates amazing pieces of art. Process art is an artistic movement where the end product of art (and/ or craft) is not the principal focus. The term process refers to the process of the formation of art, like gathering, sorting, collating, associating and pattern. Process art is concerned with the actual doing and how actions can be defined as an actual work of art; seeing the art as pure human expression, it often entails an inherent motivation, rationale, and intentionality. Therefore, art is viewed as a creative journey or process, rather than as a deliverable or end product.



Drawnonward
David Connearn
2001

OP OP OP Art

Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions. There are three main types of optical illusions. Literal optical illusions create images that are different from the objects that make them, physiological ones are the effects on the eyes and brain of excessive stimulation of a specific type (brightness, colour, size, position, tilt, movement), and cognitive illusions are the result of unconscious inferences. With all these patterns and colours it reminds me of the children’s toys Kaleidoscopes. The kaleidoscope had optical illusion patterns and you used to twist the tube to make the pattern change.
Optical art, is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing. Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in only black and white. When the viewer looks at them, an impression is given of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or alternatively, of swelling or warping.

  

Riley

Bridget Riley uses repetition within her paintings. Riley's painting 'Fall' 1963 is a good example to show how she uses repetition. Riley has repeated a single curling line and when you look at the painting it seems like it is moving but it isn't. When I look at this painting it reminds me a lot of process art and repeating the same process in like an obsession. The painting is on canvas with one line repeated across in the colours black and white. The line starts of with a big wave and then seems to get more squashed at the bottom the painting and the more you look at the bottom of the painting the more you see the painting move.

          I try to organise a field of visual energy which accumulates until it reaches maximum tension' Bridget Riley.

This quote explains what she wants to achieve in her work and what impact she wants to give the audience. In 'Fall' 1963 a single perpendicular curve is repeated to create a field of varying optical frequencies. Though in the upper part a gentle relaxed swing prevails, the curve is rapidly compressed towards the bottom of the painting. The composition verges on the edge of disintegration without the structure ever breaking. Riley began her first Op Art paintings, working only in black and white and using simple geometric shapes- squares, lines and ovals. Although she investigated many areas of perception, her work, with its emphasis on optical effects was never intended to be an end in it self. It was instinctive, not based on theory but guided by what she saw with her own eyes.

From 1961 to 1964 Bridget Riley worked with thecontrast of black and white, occasionally introducing tonal scales of grey. During the 1960's a powerful print came on the scene. These prints might have influenced Bridget Riley's work with all the shapes. With this idea of lines and repeating pattern David Connearn's work  links to Riley's with his huge line paintings and drawings and the idea of process art like Eva Hesse's practice of accumulation in pieces of work such as 'addendum.



Fall
Bridget Riley
1963


http://www.op-art.co.uk/bridget-riley/

This website has information about Bridget Riley threw the years and explains her choice of colours used in her drawings and paintings.

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol uses repetition in his work. I have chosen to look at 'Marilyn Diptych' 1962.  The reason why I like Andy Warhol prints is because of his repetition. By repeating the iconic image of monroes face it stands out more than just having one print of her because the repeating of her face gives the painting mass and the bigger the mass the more impact it has on the audience.
'Marilyn Diptych' is 50 prints of Marilyn Monroe’s face repeated across a board. 25 of the prints are in colour. Warhol's work is synonymous with pop art which employs aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects. It is widely interpreted as a reaction to the then-dominant ideas of abstract expressionism, as well as an expansion upon them. Then the other 25 prints are in black and white which look like they have all been photocopied. The black and white prints don't give use much of an impact then the colour prints do because the colour prints stand out more against the black and white prints.

Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962. In the following four months, Warhol made more than twenty silkscreen paintings of her, all based on the same publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagara. Warhol found in Monroe a fusion of two of his consistent themes: death and the cult of celebrity. By repeating the image, he evokes her ubiquitous presence in the media. The contrast of vivid colour with black and white, and the effect of fading in the right panel are suggestive of the star’s mortality.

Andy Warhol was the most successful and highly paid commercial illustrator in New York even before he began to make art for galleries. Nevertheless, Warhol's screen-print images of Marilyn Monroe, soup cans and sensational newspapers stories, quickly became synonymous with Pop art. Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular culture such as advertising, news, etc. In Pop Art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, and/or combined with unrelated material.

Marilyn Diptych 

Andy Warhol

1962

Tate Modern

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/yayoi-kusama

This link is for the Tate Modern's recent Yayoi Kusma exhibition. 

         This is a varied, spectacular exhibition of a truly unique artist. There has never been an exhibition of this size of her    work in the UK and this is an unmissable opportunity for both Kusama fans and those new to her work. www.tate.org.uk