Today our group was graced with Louise Giovanelli, a fine artist graduated from Manchester who is venturing into the artistic world of personal reflection and critique. Her idea of momentum and the continuation of energy throughout her early career was both inspiring and fascinating to watch unfold. She took us via the start of her experimentation, throughout use of various mediums, colour studies to the accumulation of her work within residencies around the world and her current exhibitions.
Initially, she used simple, transient objects held by chosen models to photograph on film in order to produce an image of inspiration for her paintings. These included paper birds, balloons and a fish tank she owned at the time, which had no common permanence; something the she wanted to created using oil paint. This use of various materials in deep colour (due to the film format) led to her interest in the materiality of pain5. “The subject matter had conduit meaning compared to the paint” (Giovanelli, L. 2019) and so she repeats the same paintings over and over to test the image and its meaning, and tease the subjects validity. This brought her, in her second year of her BA, to a greater appreciation of experimentation and her own work.
Giovanelli, L. 2015. Mirrored Histories. [Oil on canvas] Manchester, England.
Whilst improving her own skill, she became more involved in the Art History background of painting techniques and artists’ own influences in succession; Velazquez to Fra Angelico and so on. This interest in the history became a learning curve for Giovanelli, and really helped me understand her work further, already having the understanding of certain art movements and styles. She reiterated our learning of how the success of the painting is in how it is created and formed, not in the biography of the artist, encouraging the fine artists in the room to use their work as studies. Studies of colour, form, disciplines and credible references.
Her work in the final year of her BA and into her MA correlates into a particularly new process; she travelled to various galleries and picked out small particular details in old renaissance style paintings, having taken a snapshot, she returned to a scaled down version of painting in oils and removed the original context through her own style. This technique became her own distinguished style and got her exhibitions in Ghent, Belgium followed by the Grundy Gallery, Blackpool and Touchstone Gallery, Washington. It also meant acceptance onto rare and interesting residencies at Griffin Gallery, London as well as Cove Park, Scotland and amazingly Atlantic Centre for the Arts, Florida (the master artist residency).
Giovanelli, L. 2016. A Short History of Misunderstood Words. [Oil on canvas] London:England.
Though impressive, the most intriguing part of her talk was the post residency reflection of her work. She disembarked from her well known style, eager to get out of the pigeonhole she seemed to have entered, by venturing into collages and making her own subject matter (using black plasticine to reflect sculptures by that of Rodin) which allowed her to control the stimulus and shapes of her oil paintings. It also inspired a contrasting way of exhibiting, as she put extremes next to each other with the black prints, etchings and paintings were interchanged by repeated, bold pink versions of the same image. She concluded with a snippet of her artist statement, implying that her “paintings are through me, not of me”.
I’m excited to try and visit her upcoming exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery at the start of June, that will include permanent collection paintings alongside her own work inspired by artists, Mark Mander and Victor Man. It will reflect her idea of influence and layers and productivity and is sure to be successful.
HXLLISON ART HISTORY 