JULIAN OPIE, CORNISH COAST 1: LANTIC BAY, CORNISH COAST SERIES, SIGNED DIGITAL PRINT, EDITION OF 20, 2017
Cornish Coast 1: Lantic Bay is a print from Julian Opie’s Cornish Coast series from 2017 featuring a stylised landscape scene of a beach in Cornwall. The print is typical of many of Opie’s landscape prints, depicted with flattened colour and simplified shapes in a limited palette of brown, black, white, grey and blue.
Opie works from digital photographs to create these prints, stripping the original image down to its most simplified form with computer-share lines and inkjet printers. Much like the images that make up the artist’s Winter series (2012), Cornish Coast 1: Lantic Bay is a multi-layered composition with a great sense of depth, that toes the line between realism and representation.
Speaking of his interest in producing landscape prints of Cornwall, Opie has said: “I think we use picturing all the time in order to navigate and interact and it’s how I know I am present. By putting that picture back out into the world, on the cave wall or website or gallery, I can extend, record and play with what I see. By looking at that picture there is a doubling up of the process, a view of a view.”
Read more about the Cornish Coast series by Julian Opie.
ABOUT JULIAN OPIE
British artist Julian Opie challenges traditional approaches to portraiture through his digitally designed and seemingly contradictory, depersonalised works. Working also with landscapes and cityscapes, Opie’s highly stylised work involves the reduction of photographs or short films into figurative reproductions created using computer software. The hallmarks of his artistic style are portraits and animated walking figures, rendered with minimal detail in black line drawing. Learn more about Julian Opie.