Sarah Leal
Leal gets her inspiration for her UV photography from Saib. She gets close-up to her subjects to capture the intimate connection between the two figures, and the shadows and lights mix together to create a mesmerizing distortion between the forms and the paints. Her neon work mainly focuses on hands and arms, but has also taken images from the shoulders up.; highlighting details of the body. Even though she has taken inspiration from Saib, Leal’s work looks different because of the way she photographs her work. Unlike Saib, she uses a black background with the UV light as her only light source which leaves the models skin to look blue whilst it aluminates the paints. When she photographed the models hands/arms she used green and orange paints which created a surreal composition which caused the arms to stand out from the dark. Leal aslo uses the paints to unviel hidden features of the human body that are normally hidden by dayight. Through this series of work we are forced to focus on the elements of the human body that, in an ordinary image would be too miminal for us to be aware of. I will recreate her work in my own way but keep in mind the positions of the hands to represent Leals work.
Image Analysis
In my opinion, this is one of the best images by Leal, as unlike other images and artists she has used hands as her subject for the image. Due to the skin of the hands being dark because of the artificial lighting , this makes the paint contrast againt the skin. The composition of this image is central, which is very effective as it allows the viewers be able to see all of the image. Despite the paint on the hands not have a specific pattern, it still makes for a successful image.