Narrative

To find which direction to start my digital recreation I asked myself “what do I see?” in the painting. And by “what do I see?” I was really asking myself what are the objects and actions I kept seeing every time I looked at the work. I started with the physically observable. Consistently among many of Klee’s works, there were “strong” black lines that stand out “on” whatever background happened to fall below. What I identified as the background was grainy and patchy. The overall color of the painting is faded or “dried”, and there is a flat “distributed” application of paint. Lastly, there is a balance of long stretched and instantaneous “emblematization”. The keywords in these descriptions served as the starting points for my reimagining of the painting. An interesting realization I had at this stage of the process was that my reinterpretation of the painting was an act that was the product of a willful determination, such that I forget how I processed Klee’s painting before I intentionally wanted to reinterpret it. The artwork now was what I wanted it to be. Working in Photoshop, I wanted to preserve the curious arrangement of Klee’s painting so I set it as a semi transparent bottom layer. The structures that I filled out gained their forms in the corresponding sections, and then I cast away all other foreground elements that I considered trivial. I let the background be only the dominant reddish texture. Since the worms’ bodies followed the provided forms I drew them myself, but the background was a connection to a known form/image, that of a reddish, pebble desert, so I found a suitable image online and made it more transparent. The curviness and length of certain black lines inevitably led me to feel a sense of motion in the painting so I wanted to create actual motion in my reproduction. I followed my first instinct which was to build a pavement/sidewalk over the very hot pebbles so that they could be walked across - of course this first instinct was not a rational one since pavement in the heat is equally unbearable barefoot as the initial pebbles, but I followed this instinct anyway. Since we walk on sidewalks I wanted to make the sidewalk itself move, and so it does. The sidewalk crosses across my “painting” and it is the only moving element in my work. I made this animation using a Stop Motion app as the last step in creating my reproduction.