Invisible Cities OGR - Zenobia
Zenobia OGR by on Scribd
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OGR 04/10/2018
ReplyDeleteMorning Ollie,
Firstly, I'm really enjoying some of the new-found expressiveness of your digital thumbnails. I see in these a marked contrast to your previous approach to this project - a taking up of new techniques and approaches to digital painting that are really paying dividends. It's obvious you've given your city of choice time and effort in terms of thinking about its character and its location,. My advice therefore comes in the form of some additional things to think about - and also to push you to really consider the scale of what you're seeking to envision.
At the heart of your concept for this city there is a big logic problem: the thing about bamboo is that, as a crop, it is hugely thirsty; and the thing about your concept is Zenobians just keep building. My question would be .... from where are they getting the building materials if this city is in the crater of an old volcano on salt flats? The answer to this question needn't see you jettison your location, but it might get you thinking about this city's importation infrastructure (from where does the bamboo come and how does it get to the city?). I also have this to throw into the mix... Wakanda; we're perhaps encouraged to think about Zenobia in a rather 'colonial' or 'white European' way - huts on stilts etc - but what would a Zenobian 'skyscraper' look like - how might Calvino's 'huts on stilts' translate to something more 21st Century? This isn't an instruction, but while Calvino's snapshot of the city encourages us to think of it as 'primitive' - with its water storage and fishing poles, if we're seriously to consider Zenobia as 'city-sized' then logic dictates there must be more complex aspects we're not being shown. The real challenge for those students electing Zenobia is to get past Calvino's text - in so much as his own text describes a village or a dwelling or a hamlet - a snapshot of domestic dwellings doing domestic things. There's this wonderful tension - rules around named materials etc but the ambition to super-size Calvino's snapshot.
I'd like your low-angle and interior paintings to get into the 'problem of Zenobia' - to open out its potentialities, to extrapolate legitimately from what Calvino give us, but move past some of that off-the-peg ethnicity maybe? Regarding your influence maps, you've got some nice images there that punch up the scale excitingly - Calvino's Zenobia encourages people to 'imagine small' - the key to imagineering this city is to imagine big.