Holly Thoburn

 

Holly Thoburn is an urban impressionist and was born and raised in and around London. Her influences come from her travels to places such as India, Berlin and Australia and the street art that she sees there. Her work incorporates a mix of graffiti, colour, street art, textures and it mainly focuses on the decay of urban landscapes and spaces. To create her pieces, she takes photographs of places with features that she finds interesting and recreates them on a canvas.

 I cannot find the name of this piece by Thoburn, however I find it particularly interesting.  It is mixed media on canvas.

The main colours/tones used in the image are black, white and grey, however, a small amount of pink can be seen. At the top and on the left hand side of the picture, it appears that different shades of black and grey have been dappled onto the canvas, showing very little of the white canvas below. It looks as though the grey paint has run down the page at different lengths, eventually disappearing off the edge of the canvas. A small amount of pink paint can be seen beneath the different layers of tonal paint and ink and it looks as though Thoburn has scraped some of the paint away, revealing a crisp white colour below. In the top left corner of the picture, a sad face appears to have been painted over the layered paint. Toward the bottom of the picture is a black graffiti tag, which is covered slightly by a layer of grey paint.

I think that this piece reflects Thoburn’s concept of decaying urban spaces very well, as the black, grey and white give the picture a very harsh and urban feel. The tag-line towards the bottom of the picture echoes the urban feel, as graffiti is very common in cities and other urban area today.  It is obvious from this picture that she wanted to reflect how urban places change and fade over time. The lack of colour could also suggest that she finds cities today very lifeless, bleak and uninteresting places.

The piece links to my project because Holly Thoburn took photographs of different places in the cities she visited when she was travelling and then re-created them onto a canvas, and my project focuses on the theme of ‘memories’ which can be captured by photography and then recreated. It also links to my project because the work looks quite faded and uses tones, rather than a lot of colour, which is what I intend to do.