Untitled_Heart of Glass, 2015

Untitled_Heart of Glass integrates the wit, dark humour and beauty implied in Werner Herzog’s 1976 classic art film Heart of Glass.
Set in the early 19th century, Herzog’s narrative engages with the spirit of German Romanticism and a Bohemian community’s search for a lost glass making technique. Its psychological impact draws heavily upon the sublime imagery associated with the artist Caspar David Friedrich.

At the same time Goethe, in his Theory of Colour, makes the claim that “colour itself is a degree of darkness”. Goethe analyses colour through a psychological spectrum of memory & emotion. Of yellow, he remarks that “It is the colour nearest the light”, he later adds that a yellow “inclining to green, has something unpleasant about it”.

Uranium, discovered by the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789, was initially used as a yellow glass colourant, its use being developed further in 1834 by the Bohemian glassmaker Joseph Riedel.

John Bloomfield.

John Bloomfield
Untitled_Heart of Glass 2015
Pigment ink on Ilford metallic
90 x 123 cm