Gerhard Richter

Exhibitions, personal life, influences & inspirations-

Gerhard Richter started his exhibitions right back from 1960 up until 2016. He started painting a lot more in 1961 and varied his work massively using several different artists as inspiration like Dubuffet, Giacometti and Tàpies who themselves are very different from each other. This implies he was trying to add variation in to his own work, whilst doing this he told interviewers “I tried out everything I could”. Richter hated the majority of the paintings he created during this process but it all worked towards some of his most famous pieces of today. This point proves that experimenting is important which is why I have done it a lot in my own work like I have tested in my early sketches for example I studied an object and drew it in different ways like without looking, using different mediums such as graphite, biro and emulsion as well as drawing them at different angles and scales sizes.

Materials and techniques-

Lots of his art work is photo-paintings which are completed by a series of steps, each one being very important. He begins with a simple photograph, which he has either found or taken himself, he then projects the photograph on to his canvas, where he then traces it. Taking his colour palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark "blur" is created sometimes by using a light touch of a soft brush but sometimes with a hard smear by using a squeegee. He would also usually use oil paints, especially on his photograph paintings.

My personal references to his work-

I mainly focused on his photo-painting because I feel like it was the best way for me to add in my own personal touch which I did by first studying two main pieces of his and trying to recreate it using a fashion collage as the background which is not only added personal input but also experimented on colours. After this I did excessive amounts of research and found that I best liked the work that he created between 2003 and 2007 due to the colour schemes he used as well as the fact that he used more photograph based backgrounds.

After finding these images I drew one similar as a tester and once I was happy with it I went out and took my own photographs just like Gerhard took his own, I then did the same sort of thing as on my tester piece but this time I used lots of different materials and started experimenting on my mediums just like Gerhard in the 1960’s. from this I realised that the colours where much too busy so I focused on creating a limited pallet and started only using one simple material to cover the entire dress and now I’m going to start adding highlights in to the important areas with a bright contrasting yellow.