Category: Y1Studio

I anticipated a brief like this all year, and what a perfect one for me to end on. Working from images is something I do often, but processing images in this format was new to me. I enjoyed the process much more than I thought I would, as at the beginning of this brief I believed it would be hard for me to depart too far from the original images. Looking at my final pieces, I didn’t abstract them too far as this isn’t how I create work.

Creating work for this brief was therapeutic for me, and I’m quite proud of how these five short weeks have changed the way I view painting in regards to the marks made, the consistencies of medium used, and exactly what I choose to paint and why. Surprising myself, none of my third-stage “resolved” pieces work with watercolor, as this is the medium I tend to use. This is partially due to the materials I chose to paint on, as none of them would have taken watercolor the way I wished. The surfaces I chose to paint on were all new to me this year or this brief, as in high school and before uni I was very much an on-paper artist. When watching the first block of painting I was excited to use wood, and I’m happy that my pieces using it turned out how I planned.

Initially I believed the first stage of this brief to be not too useful in the long run, but I quickly realized that abstract marks can influence my usually subject-based works in interesting and explorative ways. This brief was all about exploring and strengthening my painting practice, and I am excited to continue this next year through my major and minor classes.

I quite enjoyed the process of hanging works to exhibit for this brief. Something about carefully measuring the gaps between pieces, finding the exact centre of each piece, and hanging my work carefully felt like a beautifully calm way to end this brief and this year. There is quite a bit of supporting work as I left essentially everything I made leading up to the final pieces, but I feel the majority of it helps to explain how I got to the exhibited result.

I’m combining two weeks into one post, as I was working on the same part of the brief for these weeks.

For this painting I really embraced working with a ground and integrating it into the piece. I liked the idea of only “colouring in” certain areas of the image/study, and used a mixture of both my colour study and line drawing to reach the final result. I hadn’t worked on this waxy paper before this painting, but I quite enjoyed how it helped the paint to just glide on.

I adore the scraping effect of this piece. It came about as more of an accident, with the intention being to rub off the newly-applied red paint. The subtle depth in the final painting is its strength in my opinion, and again I enjoyed working on wood for this piece.

This piece started from one of the line drawings for the original image, where I drew a circle guideline before starting the face. I wanted to explore the circular/spiral motion through the background of this piece, along with the transparency and how the paint seeped through the surface the portrait was painted on. The second piece was more of a mistake, as I intended the yellow paper with the gold spirals to be part of the first piece, but I didn’t like the result of this so instead paired in with the residue left behind by the original portrait.

Artist Research

Bernard Frize’s flowing almost-symmetrical abstract works inspired the “background” portions of my works these two weeks as well as the way I made marks. While I have not worked with resin, the way that both Mellegers (& Van de Elaskor) and Spitz have the blurring effect inspires me to achieve a cohesive collection when exhibiting next week.

Jacqueline Humphries’ Note to Self and Untitled are both vibrant and display Humphries’ excellent knowledge of colour. I work with similar colours myself, often using an analogous set of colours in my work. Note to Self in particular bears resemblance to the tones in my second piece, and Untitled helped inform my colour choices for the other two pieces through the almost-opposites mixing of pink-blue and yellow-blue.

Lee Ufan works with neutral tones and no clear subject matter unlike my works this week. The fading strokes of From Line contrasts with the rough short marks of From Winds to create two very separate but very effective works. I often struggle to create a wide range of marks while painting, but Ufan’s success in creating both rougher and smoother marks on almost exactly the same ground encouraged me to explore a wider range of strokes this week.

While I didn’t work on canvas this week, Sam Gilliam’s abstract marks on draping canvas use both thinner and thicker acrylic paint to create abstract surfaces that informed my making these weeks. Like I said for Lee Ufan, using a range of marks is a struggle for me, and this extends to consistencies of paint. Creating a contrast between rough and smooth marks has been a bit of a focus for me these past two weeks, seen best in the second and third pieces above. Both Rondo and Seahorses interested me when I first saw them, and when planning pieces this week I saw ways to integrate what Gilliam’s work told me.

Like mentioned in last weeks post, Gemma Smith’s work was highly influential to my work these past two weeks. Using a mixture of fluid medium and sheer tones, Fix (Reverse Shadow Painting) and Dusk Couplet again interested and inspired me. I spoke more on Smith’s work in last week’s post, but due to the influence her work had on me I thought it was worth mentioning again in this post.

Working with a wider range of surfaces than just paper has been a great joy for me this week. Painting on wood is something I’ve never really done, but I enjoyed the outcome of the first one I did (the triangular piece) so much that I processed my color studies on to wood twice more this week. Watering down paint and washing over the wood is an effect I find fascinating, especially with how it becomes more opaque as it flows down the surface. I believe the gold wash in the fabric study wood piece displays this the best, while the paper (my usual medium) is nowhere near as successful. Obviously different marks were a huge influence for all the paintings above, but none display this better than the two beach image paintings where I swirled the paint around to resemble rocks. I used the same mark making processes on both pieces, but the difference in how they came out due to the surfaces is something I was interested in exploring.

Artist Research

Noah Davis’ dripping marks mixed with clear figures and muted tones truly embody this phase of the brief for me. The subjects of my paintings tend to be people, but I was unsure of how to combine the easy-to-“mess up” image of the human form and the abstractness of mark making. Both Leni Riefenstahl and Untitled merge marks and subject in a way that really aided in my making this week.

Wilhelm Sasnal’s work has captured me. This brief has truly warmed me up to the idea of not just creating exact replicas of images when using them as a starting point, and Shoah in it’s simple, flowing, intentional lines opened my eyes even wider to this idea. I first thought Untitled was a photograph, as the range of depth achieved by just black on fabric did its job to trick my eye. I am working with acrylic paint rather than oil like Sasnal, so I would have to work harder to change the consistency of my material to create marks like this.

Rita Ackermann’s paintings, to me, have no subject matter. The titles suggest otherwise, which intrigues me. I’ve only really started to embrace and ‘get’ abstract art this year, but I have always been fascinated when the titles of abstract paintings imply that there is a subject matter being portrayed. Mama, Boy with Yamaka and Mama, For Nadia are of course included in this genre. The use of colour and flow of the lines are what drew me in to these pieces, and the knowledge that there are many many layers underneath what I can see on the surface. Layers covering others used to not make much sense to me, but work like Ackermann’s encourages me to make art while making art, if that makes sense.

I am completely obsessed with Gemma Smith’s work, particularly the pieces following the format of Move. The at-first simple idea that this is one swirl on abstract color is quickly interrupted by the layers and overlapping you can see when looking just a bit closer. I’ve been captured by the optical illusion of Move, and the layering and pure pigments in Flex. I put Gemma Smith in this week’s post even though I looked at her work after I created the above pieces because I hope to let her art influence my continued making.

Whitney Bedford’s interpretation of falling ships in Untitled (Crowded/Memory) and Ship (Turning the Rainbow) take something so tragically beautiful and dials it up to 100. Ship reassures me that linework can be just as effective and valid in ‘finished’ pieces as it is in sketches, and the decisive brush strokes of both pieces in Bedford’s portrayal of the ocean only becomes more effective in the eleven-year difference between Untitled and Ship. The use of marks like this to portray movement is something I’d like to improve on in my work.

Prepping new surfaces for painting: two different types of denim (grey and beige), and cotton, gesso.

Mark making and layering, one image.

I started thinking about my mark-making with my primed base. For one, I used a paint roller, which created a smoother surface with less texture. For another, I just used plain gesso with a brush, and for the other I used gesso diluted with water with a brush.

I then created different backgrounds using different methods. On the plain brushed gesso, I used a dark grey acrylic and brushed it on started on the outer edges, horizontally. On the diluted gesso, I used diluted grey acrylic in a ketchup-style bottle and squirted/poured the paint on it. On the rolled gesso, I used light grey paint and coated the surface.

Then, I started painting my image. On the rolled gesso, I used a sponge to apply the paint, focusing on verbs like drag and dab. On the plain brushed gesso, I used a paintbrush and focused on only using horizontal strokes, with verbs like brush, smear, and spread in mind. On the dripped canvas, I used the same method to drip the paint on, (this resulted in a VERY abstract rework of the image, and would have worked better if the paint had dried between colours).