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...
