(Guelph)
Smitten with travel and fascinated with cultural diversity, Tinga is interested in creating paintings that result from a collision of materials (e.g., wax, nail polish, oils, acrylics) and source images the result of which may pose social and/or political questions. A background in biology and specifically, population medicine, propel her forward. Working from variously-derived source materials (e.g., webcam streaming video stills and other internet images, handheld digital and satellite camera shots), she toys within the murky divide between what we watch and what we see and explores ways to create a painting vocabulary for these fugitive images of abstracted reality. Backgrounds merge into foregrounds as patches of colour fight for viewers’ attention. The nature of her practice – a response to our image-world – is based upon the already-mediated source images that she finds, chooses, mediates electronically and then mediates again in paint. A 2008 graduate of the University of Guelph’s Studio Art programme, Tinga focused on painting and art history. She has had work accepted into a number of university and other juried group shows, winning a few prizes along the way.
CAROLINE
Carol Tinga (Guelph)
Acrylic on canvas
38 x 38 inches
Caroline is a contemporary take on a common rural sight. The source image was derived from a Google internet search, cropped in Adobe Photoshop, dropped into MS PowerPoint, and then printed on one of the University of Guelph’s less-than-perfect McLaughlin Library printers. In the painting I explored the potential of acrylic paint, particularly metallic and fluorescent varieties not common in paintings of the distant past. Recently I have been looking at the works of Tony Sherman admiring his elevation of non-human subjects in large-scale paintings (e.g., shrimp, dogs) which are novel because of his encaustic wizardry, but entirely in keeping with older traditions in painting (e.g., George Stubbs’ Whistlejacket, c1762). Caroline, created with layer upon layer of acrylic paint by an on-again off-again vegetarian, explores the potential of a food animal to stand as a subject of portraiture in today’s media age. $650
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