Artist One - Tomma Abts

Tomma Abts won the prize in 2006 a series of acyclic and oil paints. Although Tomma's work is generally not planned, I plan to design a signature around her 'Teete' piece. Instead of using paints to create the geometric shapes, I plan to use folded paper, a camera and photoShop, and depending on time and then go over it with paint. 

Teete, 2003

Taken from Tate.com

Tomma Abts’s paintings are the result of a rigorous working method that pitches the rational against the intuitive. She works consistently to a format of 48 x 38 centimetres in acrylic and oil paint. She uses no source material and begins with no preconceived idea of the final result. Instead, her paintings take shape through a gradual process of layering and accrual. As the internal logic of each composition unfolds forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes ‘congruent with itself’.

Abts describes the finished works as ‘a concentrate of the many paintings underneath’, each functioning as an autonomous object revealing the visible traces of its construction. 

Abts creates a complex interplay between the painting’s physical surface and the form that it describes. Planes that appear to be located in the foreground also remain embedded within the structure of the painting itself; shapes are both overlapping and integrated. Abstract elements might hover on the edge of representation but are then undermined by an incongruous perspective or colour scheme. 

While each work develops within its own parameters, hung together in the gallery one is aware of formal and tonal relationships between canvases, reflecting the way Abts works on many at once, allowing ideas to migrate from one to another. Her titles are derived from a dictionary of first names and the process of naming marks the work’s completion. 

Tomma Abts is nominated for her solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and greengrassi, London, that revealed her rigorous and consistent approach to painting. Through her intimate and compelling canvases she builds on and enriches the language of abstract painting. 

Process

I started by choosing a typeface. I have decided on Helvetica caps, and will use this as a theme across all my signatures where I don’t want the font to distract from the message. I don’t want the signature to be an exact replica of the artwork so have just experimented with a basic two line layout with a large leading and the type following a circular path.

Once happy with the layout, I folded the two pieces of paper similar way to Teete. I then took out a camera and some lighting equipment and started to take pictures experimenting with the shadows.

I uploaded the images to Bridge and chose the ones I wanted to take further looking at tone and trying to find the prefect balance between legibility and abstract.  I then took on to PhotoShop. Once there I cleaned it up and changed things like the levels and played with colour until I settled with the images below.

For this first signature I have tried to recreate the colours of the artwork, also focusing on tone. I like it, but was not able to lose the shiny look and wanted something more representative of the artwork, not replica. I did try to achieve this my taking out the background and just leaving the type.

This one I decided to lose the colour and concentrate on shape and form, choosing a more abstract image to Photoshop. I prefer this one but still think I could go further by removing the white lines and introducing the tone with paint.