Author: Mia

Final Exhibition/ Year 1 Open Studio

These are the chosen works for the assessment. It was an interesting process learning how to prepare for an exhibition. Choosing the right artworks that worked cohesively yet still showed your skill level and what had been learned was hard. Lining up and measuring the pieces, and ensuring everything were level was also a challenge. However, I am very pleased with how this first year has gone and it has exceeded my expectations for the Visual Arts degree.

Taking all the things we had learnt over the past couple weeks, I wanted to start the process again with now knowing the final outcomes intention. This involved creating some mark making pieces using Richard Serra’s verb list, then creating some studies from images I had chosen previously, and then combining these together to create final outcomes. I enjoyed thr process based aspect of this brief as well as the continuation, allowing each step to be a build up of the previous one.

Inspired by Peter Bonde’s expressive mark making I wanted to emulate that through some of my pieces. As well as this, I wanted to explore his use of different consistencies of paint. Therefore, the middle image above was using a thinner consistency of paint to give a watercoloured effect and allow the background’s texture to show through. Moreover, I was intrigued by Joan Synder’s ‘strok paintings’ and focused on making one brush stroke for the leaves in the last 2 images meaning the movement and direction of the brush is visable in the painting. Lastly, I wanted to play around with colour by creating montoned landscape paintings, this was due to Yan Pei-Ming’s use of monochromatic portraiture. However, in painting those pieces I felt that it need a contrast of warm and cold colours to add to the piece.

Through the screen printing workshop, we were able to experiment with different methods of mark making using the screen. I really enjoyed trying the oil pastels and charcoal to transfer colour and patterns onto the screen prints. I feel that it shows a human mark and movement in the images, contrasting the reproductive element of screen printing. Like Callum Innes work, where he creates his pieces through the process of removing paint, the charcoal and oil pastels acted as a barrier to the paint allowing for this subtraction.

Another technique I was interested in exploring, is drawing overtop of the screen with different utensils to see what mark would come through. It was a little difficult to experiment with this as you had to apply a lot of pressure meaning many attempts turned into merged paint. However, I tried using paint brushes, pens and my finger to achieve different effects but it was hard to differentiate which produced which mark on the paper.

Through the collection of images and the gestural drawings done previously we used them to create more explorative paintings. The photos collected included people, without people, pieces of printed fabric, paintings made before 1900 and screengrabs from films. For many paintings it started off with a background using the verbs we had explored in the first week to create movement within the piece. Then using another colour and a chosen image, create a gestural image onto the background, using the verbs again.

I wanted to explore how the consistency of the paint changed the tone of the painting. So I worked with the thiner paints to give a water colour effect and allow for the brachround colours to show through. However, with images that I wanted a bolder outcome, I would work with a thicker paint or continue to layer the thinned out one. I really enjoyed creating textured and sporadic backgrounds to contrast with the bold image overlayed. This is what I experiemnted with through the angel paintings.

Using different mediums and surfaces we had to make gestural drawings using images of landscapes, people, still life and patterns. Simplifying the image to drawing including the most important details to ensure that it was still recognisable as to what the image was but could be translated into next week’s mark making process. One thing that i struggled with was completing the works within the time limit as usually my drawings or paintings take a long time to ensure all details are included. So through using a timer and dedicating a set limit on how long to take per drawing allowed me to work faster.

Another thing we worked on was using the screen printing lab to create a different approach to the drawings. I really enjoyed this because we learnt different methods of using the screen to translate movement and colour into a piece.

Moreover, we experimented using a warm colour, cold colour, both and then with a neutral to create paintings of the same image. It was interesting to see how people used the warm tone versus the cold tone colours, many naturally gravitated towards using the cold for shadows and warm for highlights. I would like to use this technique more for larger pieces and experiment with how the consistency of the paint changes the outcome.

Independent Artist Research:

Ghada Amer:

Ghada Amer is an Egyptian artist who utilizes stitching and embroidery to achieve her unique pieces. Amer’s work comes under the narrative of Western feminism, gender politics, and the criticism of the male gaze. What initially drew me to her work was the overlapping lines giving a slightly blurred effect. You have to look more intently to make out the shapes, which almost seem cracked on the canvas.

Peter Bonde:

Peter Bonde is a Danish artist that prefers to present the formal elements and physical facts of paintings through his work. He draws inspiration from his life and the world around him using his colour theory and bold gestural marks to represent this. The mark-making is what I enjoy most about his work, I like how expressive the lines and colours are creating layers through the different types of marks and colours. I feel this relates very well to what we are doing in class.

“Bonde’s work primarily addresses how the ‘spectacle’ has affected the individual in contemporary culture”

Cecily Brown:

Cecily Brown is a British artist whose work is heavily influenced by a variety of contemporary painters and Old Masters like Paolo Veronese, Peter Paul Rubens, and Edgar Degas. Her unique style has the appearance of being continually fluid through the vivid colours and expressive application. She shifts from an abstract form to a more figurative mode throughout the paintings, thus shifting your focus continually. The plethora of vibrant colours applied in an almost erratic way really interests me. I would like to experiment with this within my own work.

Yan Pei-Ming:

Yan Pei-Ming is a Chinese painter, most recognised for his large portraits of contemporary personalities like politicians, actors and popes. Moreover his work tackles current and historical events. His work is influenced by the European history of painting and portraiture where the traditional portrayal of status and power is seen through his portraits. His use of monochromatic portraits is very effective and really interests me. The level of detail, despite one colour being used, is something I would like to explore.

Jason Martin:

Jason Martin’s textural paintings is what drew me to his work. I like the use of large marks using brushes or other utensils to create this documentation of human movement. It allows the viewer to experience the making itself, through viewing the almost sculptural paintings. Martin “channels a minimal approach to painting through an expansive yet controlled use of colour, brush and medium”. He is a British contemporary painter whose textured paintings are often monochromatic or three-dimensional.

Joan Synder:

Joan Synder, an American artist, has been labeled an autobiographical/confessional artists who draws on her experiences and surroundings to create her paintings. She is best known for her ‘stroke paintings’ where she reconstructed abstract painting by making gestural strokes on a gridded canvas but by the late 70s she abandoned this formality and began using more text and symbols in her work.

Jackson Pollock:

Jackson Pollock was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and is best known for his ‘drip technique’ where he would pour household paint onto a canvas lying horizontally on the floor. This allows for him to experience the painting from all perspectives. I really like the second work above because of the use of colour, and the abstract 3 figures. At first, it appears to be lots of random gestural marks, but in looking closer you can make out pieces of a figure. This allows for the viewer’s interpretation of the piece.

Callum Innes:

Callum Innes is a Scottish abstract painter who creates his pieces through the concept of unmaking the making. His pieces are not produced through the actual painting but rather the removal of paint using washes of turpentine. Thus, the final product is a frozen moment of an otherwise ‘ongoing process’. This concept is intriguing because of its uniqueness, making an artwork by removal of paint contradicts the traditional meaning of a painting. The colour blocking of his work creates a very aesthetic and modernised result taking simplicity and minimalism at its core.

Peter Doig:

Peter Doig is another Scottish painter famously known for his figurative paintings that create insight into his personal experiences and political standpoint. He doesn’t want to make paintings look like photographs, but rather use photographs as a reference for his paintings, like the traditional and initial use of photography for painters when it was first invented. I really like Doig’s style because you know what the painting is portraying from the overall view yet he just gestures to what the figures and landscape looks like.

For the painting/print making brief, there is a large emphasis on mark making and flexibility within your work. The aim is to develop a process-led practice through the paint media and exploring as many ideas as possible. Through making mistakes and this exploration it allows one to generate a concept or image from the unintentionality.

For this week, we looked at Richard Serra’s famous 1967 ‘Verb List’ and how that can be translated through our works. Using those verbs, we were instructed to act them out onto the surfaces, exploring as many verbs as possible. Through this action, you were made to analyse how many different verbs could be seen within one piece allowing for a different perspective of the work.

Verbs I looked at: to pour, to drip, to swirl, to smear, to scrape, to spread, to drag, to curve, to wipe, to slide, to heap, to merge etc.

These are my final works up in studio for the studio assessment.

Through experimentation and a critical feedback session with my peers, I was able to explore different layouts of my work on the studio wall. A key thing that I had to remind myself of is that it wasn’t supposed to be a portfolio wall but rather a display and curation of my pieces. This is a hard shift to make from the high school expectations because you’re taught to fill the space as much as possible rather than give pieces the room to allow full appreciation. After the feedback session, I looked into which works had gained the most attention and why. This influenced how I viewed my layout and which works I wanted to stay up.

I had noticed that many people picked up on the circular and organic shapes within my work which I wanted to investigate a bit more through my cyanotypes. As well as this, it was suggested to place the larger scale pinhole photograph positive and negative opposite each other to mimic the afterglow and optic experience where it takes a moment to adjust.

Studio feedback:

– circular shapes within work, cycle of nature, circular motion of the tree, compelling composition, out of focus at an equal degree, gathered plants like a bouquet = a sense of awkwardness and clumsiness as well as hinting at human activity.