My name is Gabriella van der Stelt. I'm a 23 year old student at Plymouth University and I'm now in my third year studying BA Fine Art. I'm an abstract painter, with some figurative elements. I paint mostly in acrylic, occasionally in oil and I've recently taken to painting in calligraphic ink as well. My influences include comic books and video games. Fiona Rae and Howard Hodgkin have influenced my work the most, but in recent work I have also looked at Roy Lichtenstein and Franz Kline.
My work is currently about the relationship between American and Japanese comic books (known as manga) and how these two completely separate comic art styles can sometimes be merged together with bizarre yet surprising results, as seen in the paintings and ink drawings I have made. The comic book images are taken from various issues of Archie comic book Sonic the Hedgehog, an American comic about a Japanese videogame character. This lends a sense of irony to it.
The images reproduced in calligraphy ink on rice paper and canvas, are from issues released in the early 2000’s when Japanese animation and manga were very popular. Because of this the comic book artists tried to emulate the big eyes and over the top expressions of Japanese style manga, with mostly unappealing looking results. I'm an avid reader of these comic books, but it's always these early issues that fascinate me most in their strange manga like artwork. I wanted to do something with these images in my work, so I decided to poke fun at the idea of making them look even more Japanese.
At first they were reproduced in colour, but then I went even further by painting them in traditional calligraphy ink, I began to use only in black and white colours and I made the paintings themselves longer and narrower. On top of that, American Abstract Expressionist motifs (in the style of Franz Kline) cover and partially obscure the image to show where the roots of the cartoon image beneath it truly lie. It's an amalgamation of American and Japanese comic book and even traditional art styles. Hence the title three of my paintings share, Amalgamanga (a portmanteau of amalgamation and manga).
My work is currently about the relationship between American and Japanese comic books (known as manga) and how these two completely separate comic art styles can sometimes be merged together with bizarre yet surprising results, as seen in the paintings and ink drawings I have made. The comic book images are taken from various issues of Archie comic book Sonic the Hedgehog, an American comic about a Japanese videogame character. This lends a sense of irony to it.
The images reproduced in calligraphy ink on rice paper and canvas, are from issues released in the early 2000’s when Japanese animation and manga were very popular. Because of this the comic book artists tried to emulate the big eyes and over the top expressions of Japanese style manga, with mostly unappealing looking results. I'm an avid reader of these comic books, but it's always these early issues that fascinate me most in their strange manga like artwork. I wanted to do something with these images in my work, so I decided to poke fun at the idea of making them look even more Japanese.
At first they were reproduced in colour, but then I went even further by painting them in traditional calligraphy ink, I began to use only in black and white colours and I made the paintings themselves longer and narrower. On top of that, American Abstract Expressionist motifs (in the style of Franz Kline) cover and partially obscure the image to show where the roots of the cartoon image beneath it truly lie. It's an amalgamation of American and Japanese comic book and even traditional art styles. Hence the title three of my paintings share, Amalgamanga (a portmanteau of amalgamation and manga).