Painting Idyllic Places: Distortions, Disruptions and Deviations

This thesis paper articulates the ideas, creative approach, and methodology with regard to the visual component of my thesis project. As a painter, I explore the concept of the ‘public realm’ by appropriating and disrupting environmental designers’ two dimensional perspective sketches. These stylized sketches, typically used for marketing purposes within the design profession, are distorted and warped into unsettling places. Idyllic visions of parks, waterfront plazas, playgrounds, and other nostalgic public places are transformed into doomsday scenarios through the injection of fragmented media images and individual memory of catastrophic events. By making the familiar feel unfamiliar, I hope to generate a series of enigmatic and uneasy associations for the viewer. The designer's intention to convert virgin space into a democratic, civic place becomes compromised and circumspect during these moments of danger. These places deny the viewer the comfort of representing any specific location, and yet seem uncannily familiar. Built form transgresses from a designer's optimistic sketch for the future into glimpses of destruction and uncertainty. The structure of the thesis begins with an introduction to the main themes of my research. Firstly, I explore a variety of approaches to the visualization of idealized public places. By discussion of the forms and intentions of Deconstructivist architecture and the notion of the architectural uncanny, I provide a theoretical backdrop toward the investigation of contemporary approaches to placemaking. I describe my background in environmental design and the impact of my Modernist training on my painting practice. Secondly, I describe how the preceding ideas are addressed in my painting practice. By situating my work with regard to contemporary painters such as Peter Doig, Daniel Richter, Neo Rauch, and Matthias Weischer, I investigate common themes or points of departure with respect to the representation of place and space, mark making, colour and composition in their work. Lastly, I focus on six paintings from my thesis project work. I describe the creative process for generating images, discuss source material, painting techniques, the use of the figure, specific influences and the intentions of each piece.