Isolation and Egon Schiele

Within my project, I decided to create the sub-theme of isolation. This has become a reoccurring theme throughout my experimentation, with all of the paintings, drawings and even photos looking at isolating themes. I decided, not to look in the literal sense of isolated or derelict locations, but instead use them as inspirations for personal attitudes. I believe I noticed the theme when I was feeling isolated in myself and the ideas seemed to stand out within the work I was producing.
It will be interesting to see if I can progress with this idea, producing work centered around my mood and emotions, as well as focusing on my inspirations from location work.

Egon Schiele is an artist who I have found particularly useful here. I looked through a number of books exploring the artist: "Egon Schiele and His Contemporaries" and "Egon Schiele Sketchbooks" proved very useful to me and brought me to one of the most intriguing paintings I have seen by the artist: Tote Mutter.

Egon Schiele Tote Mutter

I explored different ideas within this painting considering sexuality, isolation and distortion. (Detailed analysis featured in sketchbooks.) I was very pleased to happen upon this painting as it does certainly work as a from of inspiration for these newly developing ideas.
Not only does it suggest isolation but it also incorporates the idea of inclusion of the human form to suggest the theme. The black alone would create a strong, isolating atmosphere and I did experiment with this idea, creating images using black ink and masking fluid to create harsh dark space to contrast colour or stark white.
Many of my experiments progressed in this manner and working in the incorporation of colour became rather effective, particularly when using watercolour, again a contrast to the stark black ink.

I definitely intend to explore the idea of contrasts within my paintings and further experiments as I feel they work well. Not only just creating interesting juxtapositions, but also giving a stronger isolating feel by having particular elements stand out alone against a different background, perhaps making them so different that they do become isolated from the rest of the painting around them.
Exploring this in more depth and on a large scale will be of definite use to me.