BA(Hons) Fine Art- Second Year, term 1

Phew, haven't written on here in a while. Been too busy making the work I'm about to upload (and eating too many mince pies)! I'm afraid this is still a bit of a vague overview of what I've been up to- I intend to start blogging properly when the new term starts in January. As for what I've been up to since the end of first year, here goes...

When first year ended I wanted to start afresh, and so my work didn't particularly follow on from what I'd been doing before. I became interested in negative space drawing, which appealed to my inexplicable fascination with flat shapes, line drawings and silhouettes. I started by collecting photos I had taken over summer of things like trees, shadows, rollercoasters, monuments and architecture, and traced the negative space. When I returned to uni, I went out and did some observational negative space drawings from the local environment. This left me with a series of interesting outlined shapes and patterns that hinted at subject matter, but retained their abstract elusiveness. I started to introduce a sense of depth to these drawings by copying them onto acetate and tracing paper, and layering them in different ways:

I knew I wanted to include painting in there somewhere, and because I wasn't sure what I wanted to paint yet, I began by transcribing the layers of paint that had been left on my desk over the years. I made a couple of little observational paintings of the desk surface on canvas paper, and then cut it out in the shape of one of my negative space drawings of trees. This became another of the layers with which I experimented:

Original painting of desk surface

Unfortunately I've lost a few pictures of the next couple of stages of work so this might seem like a bit of a leap. I began to develop the painting side of my work by taking photographs of waves and using these as a basis for paintings that concentrated on colour and tone. The colours I used were taken from palettes I created by listening to music (I am synaesthetic and see colour, shape and movement when I hear sounds or listen to music). I arranged these palettes into tonal order, and created this initial wave painting by transcribing the tones using a grisaille-like technique:

Original wave photograph

I was pleased with this painting, but wanted to shift the focus away from subject matter and onto the formal elements of painting, namely colour, tone and brush stroke. In order to do this, I rotated the image 90 degrees and cropped a section of it, then chose only a few of the tones to paint. I preferred this as it evoked the movement of water without being too representational.

This post has covered most of term 1, but it is to be continued...

BA(Hons) Fine Art- First Year, Part II

And so to the rest of my work from first year!
After starting off looking at pixellation in painting, I wanted to introduce another element to my work. I was inspired by an idea of Frank Auerbach's to represent the movement of objects and animals in a landscape by documenting them with coloured lines, and began to experiment with this idea in conjunction with line drawings:

In these two images, green lines represent people, blue lines seagulls, grey lines pigeons, purple lines "other birds", and red and cream lines were the headlights of cars. Yes, that's about as exciting as street life gets in Falmouth! I then began to use this idea in conjunction with pixellation:

In another painting, I tried juxtaposing clusters of pixels with a looser style of painting:

This combination of painting styles eventually led me to my final series of work, based on the city of Berlin. In these paintings, I used photographs I had taken there to create pixel paintings which provided a background to a variety of other painting languages:

The next set of images show my final painting of the year which was exhibited in our first year exhibition, and details from this piece.

The very last pieces of work from my first year were done inside a novel. Inspired by Tom Phillips' Humument, I made a few paintings and drawings on the pages of the book, leaving certain areas of text showing through and thereby creating little poems. These images haven't led to any other work so far, but who knows if they will in the future!

BA(Hons) Fine Art- First Year, Part I

I started my degree at University College Falmouth in September 2009. The first few weeks consisted of set projects that aimed to settle us in, get our ideas going, and break the ice. As an example, here's what I produced in a painting workshop:

The idea behind this was to get us to repeat an image, each time making use of different techniques, approaches and backgrounds. I found it really useful but getting all those windows in the right places was pretty soul-destroying after 2 days of it!

The next two were for a two-week project entitled "Transcriptions". Each person was assigned a painting to do a contemporary version of- we could take any aspect of the painting and update it however we liked. 
I was given "Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" by Joseph Wright: 

My idea was to look at reactions to death. I showed people internet videos of things like 9/11 and images of starving children, and filmed their reactions. Cheerful, I know! I then took screenshots and created two paintings from them:

I decided to do them pixellated to convey the fact that there is a contemporary fascination with watching death on the internet. In this instance, the "death" has gone through several reproductions before it was presented to the subjects, whereas in Wright's painting it was right in front of them.

This was the project that inspired my train of thought when we started Independent Study (left completely to our own devices for the first time- eek!). I began to cut up colour charts and use them to create collages inspired by pixellated photographs:

It's a LOT more difficult to do this than you would think. Teaches you a lot about tone though! This post will be continued...

Foundation- Final Major Project

The Final Major Project (FMP) at the end of the Art Foundation Course lasts about 9 or 10 weeks, and as the name suggests, is supposed to be the main thing that everything you have learnt so far has built up to. It's supposed to be the thing that propels you onto the degree course of  your choice, but in reality the degree interviews are about halfway through the project, and your portfolio consists mostly of the work you did before.

For my FMP I chose to explore "Mistake photography in painting". By "mistake photography" I mean photos where things have been cut off, you have pressed the shutter by mistake, things are blurred or streaked or whatever else that means it's not the photo you intended to take. What I ended up looking at were photographs of car headlights taken on slow shutter speed, meaning that the lights were streaked across the photo, and trying to translate this into painting (I realise this is no longer "mistake" photography, but that was only a starting point after all!)

Here are some of the photos I took and the paintings I developed from them:

I did a lot more work after this, and sadly I don't have the pictures on this computer for me to upload. Next time I'm home from uni I'll try to retrieve them!

So that's all for now from my foundation course. I ended up getting a Merit and, more importantly, getting a place on the degree course I desperately wanted to go to :)

Opulence- Palette Series

I can't remember exactly how the palette series came from the previous strand of the Opulence project- I think it was probably as simple as "Here are some more circles- let's paint them!" I loved the look of my paint-encrusted palette so one day just propped it up on an easel and set about painting it.
This was my first attempt, in acrylics and charcoal:

For those who knew me at this time, this loose, expressive painting style was very unusual for me. I've always been very precise and figurative in my drawings and paintings, yet at the same time always wanted to break away from it. I think this series of paintings marked the end of working how I thought I should, and instead working how I wanted to, and that's probably why it was the first project I was happy with on the foundation course. Anyway, here are the following paintings, all much larger scale than the first and done with a combination of house paint and acrylic:

I think it's the two triptyches at the end that are most successful. The last one was my first real foray into oil painting, which didn't crop up again until recently. 

Well that's all of the Opulence project. Next post- Final Major Project!

Opulence- Circular Objects

This was the first project I did on my art foundation course I was happy with, but I'm going to skim over the details of this because it was so long ago.

I think it was around February 2009 when we were set this title. I didn't think it was very inspiring, but chose to go down the route of visual opulence- basically an excuse to explore my favourite things- paint and colour!

Another aspect of it was seeing opulence in the mundane. I began to collect lots of circular objects and photograph them against white paper:

And also do the same with pastels:

These morphed into a series of paintings (I like the green one best):

And in turn the green painting evolved into a "glass panel painting":

With the rather limited facilities on my foundation course, this never became a proper painting you could hang on the wall. The things joining the corners together (for the purposes of this photograph only) were chopped-up glue gun glue sticks, and sadly it has since been disassembled. However, I'm currently revisiting the glass panel idea, so watch this space for an updated version...

P.S. The watermarks on these images are because they're from my DeviantART page.