painting wshop day 2

painting workshop day 2

altered spaces

01/10/2021

I tried again not to overthink my work, rather I wanted to focus on the process and let things unfold as they happened, to explore

I began by picking up some fabric I brought with me, a pillowcase, and holding it against the wall, I held it at an angle and I thought this looked interesting, the way that it draped. so I taped it up and I began to paint on it - gouache and then watercolour

exploring shapes and forms and colours and the way that the different types of paint bled into the fabric

the water colour soaking into the fabric more and the the pigments of the gouache separating ever so slightly, moving different distances outwards.

it reminded me of chromatography, the practice of separating and examining pigments which i had done several times in chemistry

I felt I wanted to add something else a different material and I found some newsprint, i like this sort of paper as its very thin and I stitched it to the pillowcase using brown thread

to this paper I stuck an image I had torn out of National Geographic of ancient human artefacts, tools

from the thread I had sewn the paper on with I hung some buttons in various Earth tones, some made of shell or mother-of-pearl, emulating the shapes and colours and elemental appearance of the objects in the image

i then sewed on a piece of crochet work which i had cut and unravelled, i was thinking about time and process

the crochet was undone but the threads would still bear the memory of having been worked, whether they were together or not.*

i also think theres something grounding from the tactility of natural textiles, it makes a piece feel more organic, alive

in the lecture, we had looked at the work “new accursed art club” by nigel cooke, rather than the piece itself i was more interested in his archive of the process, he mentioned adding a large sun which the figures were gathered around, he then removed this but the painting is left feeling as though something is missing, a memory in the paint as he put it.

this really struck me, the idea that a painting can seem to be something frozen in time but in reality it bears the memory of all that has happened to it and all that it has been, all of its forms, like a living thing

afterwards i felt stuck, i found i did not like what i had made and felt i needed some space from it. so I decided to begin something else and come back to it later, i got some watercolour paper and I began a gouache painting based on some of the collages that I had made in my book the day before

this was simply a painting, not mixed media, but I think it allowed my mind to unfold a bit and relax as I was carrying out a much more fluid and simple process

the way that I use gouache paint is a mix of much thicker more opaque sections next to which I will then use much more watery paint to allow the colours to bleed and merge which ever way they like, giving a watery or even stonelike effect

I would say that the stony look is enhanced by the chalky texture of the gouache when it dries

I then did another painting in gouache inspired again by one of the collages I had made the day before, but I was using colours that I am unused to

I tend to use a lot of green in my work, greens, warm greenish blues and pinks and cream, but this collage that I was basing it on was of things to do with the deep wide ocean, ice, space - dark ultramarine, black, white grey, and I didn’t want to shy from using these colours

I remember using the ultramarine and a greenish cream colour, and feeling put off by the colours, not confident in my ability to make the painting work - I don’t tend to use ultramarine much as I find it can look obnoxious in some contexts, I suppose context is very important and I do need to remember this and not shy away from certain colours

but I tried not to overthink what I was doing and I did what felt right, thinking about space and ice and darkness and bright white light and allowing the paint to move and evolve as my thoughts unfolded

The resulting painting is my favourite thing that I made on that day.

I think it’s fascinating and it’s ethereal and strange and it feels icy and cosmic and it’s unlike anything I have made before

I’m used to the greens and the plants and the Earth but this is something wholly new to me and it excites me and I think it’s beautiful

i did two more very stripped back paintings after id done this, theyre unfinished looking, sketches i suppose, but on the theme of growth and life and time, like the fabric painting from the beginning

they're both done on graph paper, it was nice to paint on as it has a smooth surface and the paint doesn’t sink in too much, so its able to glide across the surface.

i was mainly painting abstract shapes, the second is more figurative as i loosely painted a foetus and then another foetus within a rough flower shape. this one is a mixture of pencil and gouache, it reminds me of cy twombly*, the graph paper links to the scientific ideas but contrasts the very loose, inaccurate painting style

lastly i wrote the word SOUP in pencil, this was very spontaneous and came from thinking about amniotic fluid and also the primordial soup, the origins of life

perhaps this was an unnecessary addition to the painting, but i think its funny and it probably would make the viewer consider why i would do that to my painting

these paintings are a lot more graphic than the previous ones and typically i'm not very fond of using a graphic style but i was just exploring,

i think the colourful graphic style and the fact that they are very loose paintings on an unusual surface (graph paper) makes them look very naïve or childlike, as though messily scrawled onto whatever surface was available

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* see research page for cy twombly and more ideas on time and textiles (anni albers)

reflection

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