Personal Background
Olivia Parker was born 1941. She was a still life photographer and a writer. After a horrible experience of skiing, and shattering her leg, she was not allowed to go into the dark room for a year. This is when she pursued writing.
Style
Visual characteristics that her work possesses is having a perfect eye for different lightings. She has more still life pictures focusing on one/or a few objects than abstract pictures. Compared to a painting/history style it is almost completely different. Her style is more dark and light than a paint-like photo.
Philosophy
The idea behind this artist’s work is to give the ‘watchers’ eyes something unique to look at. Their personal life is in the photos because she is also an author, so the photos and books go together with a different type of style. Her social life was how she was known for still life's that have different perspectives of an object that is used in someone’s daily life. I think what they were trying to say in her images was that even in a simple object there can always be a beautiful ending.
Influences
Olivia was influenced by traditional Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish 17th century style. She has influenced me in my work because I realized that using a bit of editing tools and a ton of objects don’t always give you the same effect as one object with just different lighting can. Olivia made such a simple thing beautiful and it really influenced me to make photos just like her. In my work I want to use the dark natural lighting that she used and the black and white backgrounds.
Deep Shells
For this piece I used a black background, and shells that I have had in my room. The right one is mine and I used the highlighter and darkener to make the shells stick out more. This was fun to create even though it does not look like the original. In the future I would take a closer shot.
Crumbled Sunshine
For this creation I used hamburger rappers and a small bowl flipped upside down. This is not my favorite because the way I had to get rid of the background made the whole picture blurry. I would also just use regular yellow paper instead of rappers so I don't have the orange stripes. It was also really dark so I would use a better lighting tool to make it better and stand out.
Colorless Eggs
This is the last picture that I took. I didn’t really like how it came out because it looks too glowy. In the future I would like to use more natural lighting so I wouldn’t have to use a bunch of edits to try and make it look whiter. I would use a white piece of paper instead of a paper towel to get the cleaner look. Overall this was not my favorite piece and I would not take it again.
Artist Statement
Overall I enjoyed taking all of these pictures because of the way that I was able to use the skills that I learned to create something unique. Something that I would do differently is change the lighting because in most of my pictures that I tried to recreate they were either too dark or too light; this changed the way it was supposed to look and messed up the end result.
Sources
https://www.oliviaparker.com/