DESIGN SUBMISSION 1
DECO2101
TOM PINYON
THEMES OF THE IMAGE
The emotion I wanted to represent through this image was reverence. I chose my source images because they seemed to me to be about reverence. 'Broken Obelisk" by Barnett Newman suggests reverence through its pyramidal and monumental form (the pyramid being a universal symbol of spitituality and often used as a monument to indicate an object or idea of great importance). The broken column on this sculpture seems to signify that the thing being revered is gone or has been destroyed. Often reverence is all the more potent when the object of reverence is a thing of the past, like the ruins of an ancient culture. The fact that a version of this sculpture is located outside of Rothko Chapel, a democratically spiritual place, testifies to the connotations of reverence that are prominent in this work.
A theme that runs constantly through Mark Rothko's paintings it that of human emotion and as such, a reverence for life is apparent in his paintings and use of colour. While many of Rothko's paintings are darker in mood the one I have chosen here conveys feelings of joy and richness which I believe complement the theme of reverence.
I have attempted to give the impression that the obelisk is some sort of shrine like object by placing it in the centre of the image and focusing attention on it. By blurring and distorting the original border in the Rothko painting I intended to create a sense that a dust storm like shroud is clearing to expose the salient object in the middle of the picture.
The purpose of putting a halo like light around the obelisk is obviously to support the notion that it is an object to be revered.
PROCESS OF CREATING THE IMAGE
After creating a new file in photoshop, in which to develop the above image, I took my first source image: a photograph of the sculpture 'Broken Obelisk' by Barnett Newman, shown below,and made a selection around the edge of the sulpture, copied it, and pasted it onto my new file. My second, background image is derived from a Mark Rothko painting, also shown below, which I copied and pasted in its entirety onto my file as the layer below the sculpture. To make this backjground fill the entire canvas I tranformed its scale. I then transformed the perspectiveof the deep orange lower half of the Rothko painting to give the impression of a ground plane in perspective, to do this a new layer had to be created which was simply a selection of the bottom half of the original Rothko image. This process also eliminated the mid-orange border at the bottom of the image. By using the Clone tool I also removed the border at the top of the image giving the same yellow colour as the sky.The border at the sides was distorted by using the Clone tool at different opacitiesand bringing it in towrds the centre of the image as though it forms the cloud of a dust storm parting to reveal the Newman sculpture. I now had two layers comprising the background, and at this point I merged them together.
My next step was to give the obelisk a drop shadow, inner shadow and satin effect in the layer style menu.
I then selected the background with the magic wand tool and reversed this selection to envelope the obelisk. This selection was then feathered at a radius of five. Then the selected area was made larger with the Transform Selection tool, so that the selection was just outside the edge of the Newman sculpture.Under the layer menu I then chose New Fill Layer and gave it a solid, light colour to give a halo effect, I gave this 'halo' an opacity of 80% so that it would blend somewhat with the rest of the image. I then essentially repeated this last process, begining with the inversed magic wand selcion of the background, three times, with the exception that I chose to give these other three 'halos' a Gradient instead of choosing New Fill Layer. However, each time it was repeated, I made the selection lager than before with the Transform Selection tool as well as reducing the opacity (at the last repetition it was only 20%), this was to try and create the effect of 'halo light' that faded as it moved further away from the obelisk.
Because the drop shadow had given the obelisk an unwanted shadow to its immediate left, I used the Eyedropper tool to get the colour of the inner halo right next to the obelisk (where it is lightest) and used the Brush tool to 'paint' over the unwanted portion of shadow.
The final step in creating this image was to place two of the 'halo' layers over the top of the obelisk to give the impression that it was either emerging from a haze or else eminating light itself.
Sculpture by Barnett Newman
Image sourced from: http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/texas/houston/rothko/newman.html
Painting by Mark Rothko
Image sourced from: http://images.google.com.au/images?q=Rothko&hl=en&lr=&sa=X&oi=images&et=title