Overlapped portriats

Alex Garant

Voyage of The Insomniac- Alex Garant

(LOS ANGELES, CA) – Thinkspace is pleased to present Voyage of The Insomniac, featuring new works by Toronto-based, Canadian, Québéquois artist Alex Garant. Garant became famous for her unique approach to human portraiture — while realistic in nature, her paintings also use optical art techniques that make them look completely surreal. The technique that Garant applies to her paintings comes from photography and is called double exposure.

What is the Double Exposure/ Op Art Technic Alex is creating in her art. ?

Not unlike the fugitive flicker of a screen or the spectral layering of multiple film exposures, her portraits reveal an unsettling multiplicity, shifting beneath the subject’s surface. Garant is in search of the frenetic internal life of the sitter.

What do you thing she means by "the frenetic internal life of the sitter?" how is this illustrated and why do think this is important to her art?

Garant has long been fascinated by the interaction of patterns and symmetry, and the resulting optics of their graphic repetition and layering ie her painting of multiple eyes. Her portraits begin with a series of superimposed drawings based on her sitters, actual individuals, and muses from her life, and pushes the familiar confines of portraiture to a newly strange and re-sensitized place of sensory confusion. Her subjects and their energy seem to erupt from within, testing the tensile seams of the skin, the body, as always, an insufficient vessel for the incongruous experience within.

What is the symmetry and repetition? how is it demonstrated in her art?

The artist’s labor-intensive oil paintings are meticulously executed, often incorporating patterning or other graphic elements and motifs to produce reverberating visual effects. Her color palette ranges from the subtlety of realistic flesh tones to hyper-colored gradients, saturated pastels, and translucent gem-like washes of color. Her stylizations of these vertiginous portraits thrive in surreal kitsch to interrupt the apprehension of the subject, activating a process of invested viewing, that is of trying to “see” the person amidst the trappings of hallucinatory visual interference. The compelling and somewhat unsuccessful process of attempting to stabilize the image produces a fundamental feeling of perceptual instability, one that intensifies our stolen communion with an evasive subject.

(from Thinkspace Projects http://thinkspaceprojects.com/shows/alexgarant-2018/)

Double Vision: The Artwork of Alex Garant

Queen of Double Eyes, Alex Garant studied visual arts at Notre-Dame–De-Foy College just outside Quebec City. After graduating in 2001, she ultimately settled in Toronto, Canada. She decided to truly commit to her passion for Arts after suffering from a heart attack in 2012, changing forever how she would see the world.

As a pioneer of “Contemporary Figurative Op Art,” her oil paintings offer a graphic quality combined with traditional portrait techniques. Garant establishes herself as one of the leaders of analog Glitch Art by using patterns, duplication of elements, symmetry and image superposition as key elements of her imagery. Alex Garant’s paintings are certainly conversation pieces as they are meant to engage observers into an image investigation process and hopefully enlist their senses differently while doing so. (from Esthetic Lens Magazine http://www.estheticlens.com/2018/02/26/double-vision-the-artwork-of-alex-garant/)

https://aplus.com/a/alex-garant-double-exposure-paintings?no_monetization=true

Artwork Critique

Analysis: Describe what you see and how the work is organized

What is the title
what is they medium and style of the art ie realism, surrealism etc.
what do you see/ observe
what things stand out to your
is there any are principles ie line, color,

Interpretation or Infer: Describe how the work makes you think or feel based on what you see?

Describe the expressive qualities you find in the work. What expressive language would you use to describe the qualities (i.e., tragic, ugly, funny)?
Does the work remind you of other things you have experienced or other ideas or events in the world and/or in your other studies?
What do you think based on your observation the artist is saying? what is the meaning?

Judgment or Evaluation: Present your opinion of the work's success or failure:

What qualities of the work make you feel it is a success or failure? ie why
How original is the work? Why do you feel this work is original or not original?

Project: overlapped Portriats

Step 1
Inspired by the work of Alex Garant
choose a portrait and a feature of the it that you feel is important and conveys a message. You are going to focus on that feature (nose, mouth, eyes. ear etc) and either use repetition or Symmetry to create emphasis and meaning. Just like the multiplicity project go to Photoshop and using opacity, erasing and spot healer tool create your sketch!
Your sketch must

display an emphasis of either symmetry or repetition
be a portrait
use hue and value to convey mood

Step 2
Paint your image

you may stylize it or do photo realism.

Project Assignment

students will choose a portrait and highlight a feature of it by creating a focus by the use of repetition or Symmetry. This will create emphasis and meaning. Students will create a digital painting from this sketch

Assignment must