Synapse Festival | Artists | Wayne Mitchelson

‘The embodiment of Romantic art is a heightened sensitivity to the natural world, combined with the belief in nature’s correspondence to the mind; a passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and faraway (objects shrouded in fog, a distant fire in the darkness ect.); a celebration of subjectivity, often coupled with a morbid desire that self be lost in natures various infinities; an infatuation with death; a valorisation of night over day; and a melancholy, sentimental longing which can border on kitch.”
Joseph Leo Koerner

The above description summarizes what the Romantic artists were trying to do, Particularly Casper David Friedrich, the 19tth century German Romantic painter who’s work inspired me into my current practice. In my own work I have been Experimenting to try and capture Friedrich’s Aesthetic, using his compositional devises, time of day, mood and use of light. My initial landscapes have now combined with my love of films from directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott, David Lynch and Roman Polanski to create a “One frame cinema” image, like artists Gregory Crewdson and Philip Lorca Dicorcia. In their work, and now in my own, the piece of work has cinematic qualities in its look, feel and composition and gives the effect of being a film still from an unmade film, frozen in mid scene, a moment of transition between before and after.

An idea for a piece can come from anywhere, an experience, a place, film or more increasingly from works of literature from authors like Samuel Beckett, Philip K. Dick, J.G Ballard and most importantly Franz Kafka’s series of short observational writings called “Meditations”, short stories where Kafka writes about everyday situations. In “The men passing by”, the inspiration for my own piece “Two men running”, the narrator meditates on the vision of a man running down the street in the night. He imagines several scenarios involving the man and another man chasing him, raising issues of the narrator's responsibility for the possible actions of the two men, this idea echoes with the idea of “one frame cinema”.

I approach a piece of work in the same way as a painter, infact my biggest influences come from painters including Casper David Friedrich, Peter Doig, Edward Hopper and Chen Wenji. I make sketches for ideas and composition as a start point. I then build the picture up over time using digital photographs taken by myself or found stock photographs, then digitally manipulated, combining the photographs into the one final image. Iv restricted the tools used on Photoshop to just the basic, cut, paste, colour, light and dark balance and layers, this keeps things more simple allowing me to focus on the image rather than get lost in the huge amount of options Photoshop gives. Future work from here will be to create even more cinematic images and to take my process into moving animated images.

Wayne Mitchelson | 07708639322 | waynemitchelson@live.co.uk