Exhibition Review " Tallest of Tales"

The piece I have chosen is a modern acrylic painting by Alison Erika Forde. The exhibition is called the tallest of tales. I was drawn to the piece as it is a very playful and imaginative piece of work. The content of the painting looks very surreal, depicting a conga line of different animals, with swapped heads. This in turn creates a very surrealist, almost dream like image, mimicking in my opinion being in an intoxicated state when your awareness is impaired and everything becomes a blur.

Naturally each animal is prey or predator, but in this image the roles are reversed, with emphasis on them having a good time and even though each animal is linked to each other there is no food chain in this. The marks used describe the vibrant mood of the animals and party. There is no outline on the creature’s only blurry lines, which create a distorted form and again create the drunk like state, which helped to create fun imagery. There is shading on the animals, which helps to define features, using simple brush strokes. These help to describe the texture of the animal’s fur and skin, which enable me to imagine more easily what the animal would feel like. This method of working is very similar to the way I have work in class.

I liked the composition of the piece as it was done over four separated images; however the conga line is joined through each image creating a nice balance to the image. It created a kind of mockery of the food chain and it was almost like a set of photographs, again looking back at a good time. The scale of the piece was quite big, but it did help to create that long conga line, in this almost childlike image.