Nicholas Wright

Nicholas Wright (1940) is a British dramatist. He opened and ran the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, was joint artistic director of the Royal Court and is a former literary manager and associate director of the Royal National Theatre. Other than a dramatist, he is also a sculptor who uses paper as well as lights to create contemporary art in form of light sculptures. He uses paper to create cut-outs of buildings and assembles them in a very dramatic way that when you put a light to it, everything comes to life.

I find this very interesting because this artist uses light to his advantage and creates something that wouldn't be what it is without this light. The image below shows a sculpture built around a lamp. When you light this lamp up, it becomes a scene of a large city.

For first impression of his work I was amazed by how much depth his work has and that he uses simple buildings and trees to create such an atmosphere.

His work itself gets me into a mood as if I was at the scene. The light creates a contrast and by using multiple layers of paper, he create tones and used it to change the brightness of the scenery. Everything is darker close to you and as you look at the horizon, the whole place is lit with light very similar to what you would expect if you were standing there.

What I like about his work is the feeling you get when looking at his artwork. It doesn't look like paper when you first glance at it. You only start to realize what it's made off after you finish looking around. 

As a response, I used one of the images I took in Piccadilly Circus and created a small paper installation on the style of Nicholas Wright, but with influence from Whistler. 

I took a piece of blank paper and drew the outline of the sky box from the image. I then stuck the sheet of paper to another and cut it out leaving me with 2 layers of paper that will go at the back of the response. I did the same for the lamp posts and the people at the front of the image. Nicholas focused on the detail of his sculptures, but since I wanted this response to be influenced bu Whistler, I didn't go for any detail and made it simple, but at the same time, I captured an atmosphere in the image. I took a photo of it during night when all lights were out, placed a torch behind the response and took an image. The response below was the result. 

I want to take this little experiment and carry it through to make a full response to Nicholas Wright himself because the one below was influenced by multiple artists. Also I will take the experiment I already have and produce a sketch while still capturing the mood and see if chalk can capture the same feel the response below did.

I realised that creating 2D responses to this artist will not be enough to fully explore it'spotentials. What I did was created a large installation where I used various transparent materials to create a small recreation of buildings from my primary sources and existing responses.

I was able to recreate the mood that Nicholas Wright has captured in his own artwork. I can that because each of those images give out their own impression and each contain their own atmosphere. You can also tell that each has their own perspective as well as different light which was achieved by using multiple cameras to record this response.