This brief was really enjoyable and sent me on a big personal debate with myself. I had enjoyed sculpture but painting just came to me easier. I also enjoyed being in the print labs more as I have really grown to love screen printing this year. This brief has really helped me get a better grasp on how I paint and process images I recreate. If I were to learn anything from this brief is that sometimes it’s better to walk away from a piece of work and not to touch it again. I really struggled with that while working but I have grown to really like the work I produced.
I think my most successful work is my biggest painting of the recreation of the ’before-the-1900s’ painting/print, portrait paintings and my still life paintings/prints. These works I feel capture the brief better than the rest of my work as they show more expressive marks and have more detail than the rest (shading and depth wise). I think my more unsuccessful work would be my landscapes. Though they look good I really did struggle with capturing the foreground, mid ground and back ground. Majority of my landscape paintings also lacked expressive mark making. I think overall my work got better the more I worked, I was pretty rusty as i hadn’t painted in a few months but I think overall my work looks good.
I think the most challenging thing in this brief was as I mentioned, not spending a lot of time on one painting. I tried limiting myself to half an hour so that I wouldn’t overwork the paint. I didn’t follow this strictly but when I did my work looked as little neater. I also struggled with colour and not sticking to the same colours I already mixed. I don’t like feeling wasteful with paint so mixing new colours was not an often occurrence which I think affected my work overall.
Something to improve on is exploring with colour and subject matter more. I think I restricted myself too much regarding these 2 and as I said it impacted my work overall. Another thing would be to continue to learn when a painting is done and needs to stop being worked on.
