Continued from Deletion. DP: Layering

 Layering Technique in Art

Artistic Use of Layering

As artists continue to grow in their respective fields of the creative industry, they pickup various skills and techniques to incorporate into their works. One of such techniques is that of layering, where an artist will stack multiple sources of art overtop of each other. Juxtaposing and overlapping these separate pieces means that the independent prestige of each work used is lowered, as each one becomes a part of a whole.

https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/julie-mehretu-howl-eon-i-ii/

Artists will use layering to add complexity into their works, along with burying various meanings under one another to end up with a mixed cumulative meaning that might not even be possible to take away from the final product. Indeed, works that use layering can easily end up becoming too complicated and overwhelming that the intent of the final work is not of a simple meaning, but of how the different meanings of the separate pieces interact with each other. For visual reference of this concept, consider what Julie Mehretu does with her works. When she was creating for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she wanted to make something that captures a part of the history of San Francisco.

theepochtimes.com/thomas-coles-influence-across-oceans-of-time_2471819.html

For that, she considered the geography of San Francisco and how it exists as both this beautiful land that also carries a bloody history of Native American loss. With that, she decided to incorporate that idea into her painting. It may be hard to tell, but blurred-out old paintings of the beautiful geography of San Francisco work as the foundation of her work. Anything that she draws over it, or layers over it, now interacts with the geography and its relationship to the history of San Francisco in terms of the meaning of the work. That is where the sometimes incomprehensible complexity of layering comes into play. There are simply too many things interacting with each other, possibly creating all these different smaller meanings, that it is simply not possible to understand the piece as a whole.

 

For more on Julie Mehretu's work with layering, here is the full 10 minute documentary that goes through her creative process from start to finish for the two paintings noted above.

How I Could Incorporate Layering in my Work

As primarily a filmmaker, I would be focusing on how to add layering to my films. This would mean either stacking things on top of each, one after another, during a scene, or have a scene set up in a way in that there are a multitude of different elements interacting with each other in the shot. The reason to do this would be that I, too, could overwhelm my audience with stimuli and/or have several elements with their own meanings coming together in a shot to make up a shot of several figurative interactions.

https://www.artpal.com/artisticflare?i=74347-11

One idea I had for my concept of looking inwards into the human experience was that of attempting to illustrate a moment of emotional chaos within someone. That could be attained by throwing several colors together, with each being shaped differently depending on the emotion they would be representing (for instance red would be angry and spiky, while blue could mean sadness and more round). While there isn’t a total meaning of the layering in the shot (aside from that of there being a general discord of emotions occurring), the smaller parts help the viewers understand that there are several clashes of emotions happening within the shot. It would look similar to the attached painting, but the colors would have more form and would obviously be arranged differently.