This morning I handed in my complete portfolio for assessment by the fine art department. The weather has taken a sudden turn for the grim and wet after the sunny easter and I found myself trudging through puddles up to the studios with a heavy heart. It took me the rest of the day to figure out why; now the studios are closed until September. I knew this already of course but the reality sunk in finally. It isn't so bad considering I'll soon be working away in my little studio space in Glasgow and I do have a ton of ideas to be getting on with. The trouble is that I have to hang around for a week, waiting to be interviewed.
So what do I do with my time? Basically, I can swim a lot, maybe read, maybe draw. I feel that old ferocious energy to make stuff nipping at the back of my head and I have so little space. Still, all my materials are available to hand so I've rearranged the furniture a little and pieced together a makeshift easel out of boards and newspaper so I can paint some small studies over the next few days. Its not a nice feeling this - I'm pulling in lots of different directions at once. The waiting is getting me down. I'm naturally so impatient. I think I need something more solid to be working on - answers on a postcard please.
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01/04/09
This semester's work is drawing to a close. The time has rushed by - it feels this way due to the intensity of work only. To pick over it all is always a surprise. Its quite a body of material for a few months.
There have been a couple of small projects that round off the portfolio. One is a vaguely titled brief; 'Belonging' - a term that we were encouraged to interpret any way we wanted. I used it as a starting point to work on themes of economics, property and housing. Unsurprisingly, a dry subject produced dry results. I took scores of photographs of doors, windows and vents and then used them in a high-resolution collage.
This collage was then used to texture map 3D forms of tower blocks reminiscent of the rows of post-war Stalinist architecture that I saw when flying over Sofia, Bulgaria. I emphasised the open and empty spaces and implied a haze, or stagnant atmosphere.
Neither of these pieces are exactly bundles of joy but the other project, at its completion, turned out to be quite soothing and pleasant. This brief was to create an original sound piece and then create some accompanying visuals. Many in my group went straight to story boards and sketchbooks but I decided to bypass a narrative element completely and make something totally abstract. The soundtrack was made with acoustic sounds layered with digital effects. Similarly, the video element is a series of deliberately overloaded bright lights creating lens flares and sensor artifacts, again manipulated digitally to correspond with the swells and lulls of the music. It seems quite a happy and relaxing thing to me.
I now have a few weeks off before compiling and submitting all the work of the last few months. I also have a few ideas that refuse to go away until I've made them into something. A little rest is called for, certainly. It'll be a few days until I start up on something new. Anyway, tonight's the night of the end of year party - I'm going to finish up here and go have a couple of dozen drinks. Cheers.
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24/03/09
Another two week project has gone by. This one felt a little rushed thanks to written and other work piling up. After the extravagant use of space in the last project I decided to bring this back to something a little more intellectual - not just a gratuitous exercise in making 'things'. The brief was fairly open; geared towards the study of parks and other civic spaces which, lets face it, wasn't particularly inspiring. Trailing around the parks of Dundee with a camera didn't produce any idyllic images. It felt more like walking with trepidation and guilty voyeurism. Some of the parks seem to be overflowing with refuse and mud. Overall, I took away impressions of bright cold light and people running.
Quickly, I pieced together a composition and, as I've spent a lot of time studying Bacon's paintings, decided to create an image that was undoubtedly reminiscent of something he would have done. This was also to pretty much doom the painting to failure before it had even begun but it was an interesting exercise nonetheless.
The 'graffiti' was supplied by various others in the studio which gives rise to a question of ownership and/or random chance. The three spheres of tree line were a deliberate reference to lens flares from photographic sources - also a Bacon reference. Still, the thing that occupied the most time was the form of the running figure. I drew from images of joggers and soldiers, continuously scraping off pint and reapplying colours until I was able to arrive at a form that approximated the balance that I thought the painting needed. Certain things work for me, particularly the range of blues in the shadow portions. I also like some of the quick, scraping marks. Here, the opposite end of the paint brush was used to carve down into the under painting.
Rather than continuously struggle with this over-complex and confused image, I stuck with developing this running figure. Whether this was because it was the one facet that needed the most work or because I hope it may recur in future images, I developed a couple more relatively quick studies.
Anyway, I'm moving on to a video project next. Danny Boyle's Sunshine is inspiring this. Although it isn't the best sci-fi movie in the world, I think it is beautifully crafted with an astounding soundtrack. Some of the recurring images of bright overpowering light become their own abstract 'moving paintings'. Using these as a starting point I'm going to create a sound-piece and then edit my own strange little film.
Finally, a day's introduction into waterless lithography produced this one quirky result. I really can't offer much to discussions on printmaking at this stage being a complete beginner. I can't say I'm drawn to it as yet but there's a kind of academic guilt loaded onto any question of avoiding the tradition. Maybe I'm just too used to digital equivalents.
This was inspired by the suggestion of drawing a female version of myself. Again the Bacon-esque lines are creeping in. If that can be ignored I can only conclude that this figure, my female alter-ego appears to be a young New York typist living in the 1940s - possibly inflicted with some hi-tech alien, cyber virus. Who would have thought?
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08/03/09
This project has turned out a lot of work. Without thinking too much about anything other than experiences of using new materials, I have quickly moved from one piece to another, occasionally pausing to prime another board or mix another batch of plaster.
As an overall body of work, it bears little if no relation to the starting object. If I attempted to classify them in some way, they all seem to explore a relationship between traditional 2D image-making and sculpture. Put simply, if I start to explore something the default behaviour would be to sketch or draw; to make an image. In these last two weeks most of what I have made has attempted to reach off the flat surface and impose some kind of texture or impression of depth. Flat panels have erupted into crenellations and scars - in one case I used dowel at the corners of a plane to project another flat surface to obscure the one beneath. It still feels like a painting to me but it clearly isn't.
Sheets of polythene have been used everywhere. I'm used to fixing sheets of wax paper onto a painted surface in minimal sections but this has been so much more extreme. I love to see the chance effects of light shining through and off the plastic. Also, there's a perversity to concentrating on rendering a detailed or textured image only to cover it with polythene - there's some kind of ruthless honesty to using nails to hammer the sheet over the image, directly into the wall.
This is an odd feeling. I'm uncomfortable making 3D work because I don't feel the familiar struggle that every painting has during its making. Even after all this work with textures, I found myself consciously pulling in more traditional directions in an attempt to impose some order onto the collection.
By this point, I was using raw materials for everything and not really considering any composition. I stretched polythene rather than canvas over a wooden stretcher with the intention of painting vertical white strips. Straight away, this felt dishonest. I had come this far so why simply make a painting? It would be a step backwards. I returned to the materials - this time the nails. I hammered a great many into the wall in marked out areas to fit between the wooden cross-beams and then hung the 'canvas' over them.
The result is a 2D image. Yes, the piece is sculptural in that it utilises 3D components but the border and flat plastic surface unifies the finish of the image so that it can be visually accepted as a painting. On the down-side, it can't be easily shifted from place to place. I foresee a long time spent with the claw end of the hammer and wall-filler.
Finally, having huge quantities of polythene at my disposal and a desire to be even more selfish about the amount of studio space I was taking up, I made a final large-scale installation in the vague hope of drawing a line under it all. I cut the plastic into long strips and spent a long evening stapling them into the ceiling. I made a vaguely cylindrical form that the viewer can walk into and stand inside. The strips were arranged in an almost random manner so that the cylinder wall was not too rigid but diffuse.
Oddly, making this thing was much like painting; each pre-cut strip could be placed like a brushstroke- a process of deciding where to put each mark, balancing and composing.
It seems like a lot of effort for something that'll all have to be pulled down soon so I made sure to get some reasonable photographs. One late evening in the studio saw me creeping around in the dark, waving torches throughout long exposures. I managed to get some passable interior shots using a parabolic mirror.
So that's the end of that project. So much work has been produced and that's partly because it is slick and easy in comparison to more conventional image-making. All these things are merely experiments rather than finished pieces. I feel the urge to work on something a little more challenging now - something more precise and considered, something that doesn't involve relentless static electricity shocks every two minutes. There should be public health warnings on those rolls of plastic.
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25/02/09
The 'Muppet Mouth' is hanging in front of its painting in the upper gallery. For something so passive and self-contained to be on display to the public, it was strange to see how many wanted to interact. My mouth dropped open to see people swiping at it to make it spin. I suppose it invites interaction to some. Maybe I should have put a sign up that said, 'Don't Touch Or I'll Bite!'
Other work is galloping ahead of my own attention span. I started with a donated 'object' - in my case, a reel of yellow ribbon. Rather than conjuring any conceptual framework (which would be hard and pointless, let's face it) I have paid attention only to the colour and form of the reel. Unsurprisingly, vertical marks are dominating. This image is a huge drawing - masked areas are coloured with acrylics, charcoal and coloured chalks.
I have been drawing and painting in different scales and have been using strips of polythene to obscure large areas of each image. In some cases polythene utterly covers the surface at a distance of several inches. From the point of view of painting, this sudden lurch into abstraction makes me consider whether I have any condition of 'finish' in each painted surface because now the final surface is plastic. So, are any of these paintings or sculptures? Are they objects or images?
It is the materials themselves that have led me to work this way. I have a host of unfamiliar substances ready to hand. Knowing that I wanted to build up heavily textured areas I am using pigments mixed with crushed charcoal, PVA glue, plaster of paris, and coarse sawdust that I have been scraping out from between the stones in the next lane. There is an industrial vent that exhales all this powdered wood from within the fine art work shop. I've been harvesting it each day and taking it back inside to mix up these witch's broths. The results always vary as I'm not mixing materials in any measured way to replicate previous results. Also, the glue component is opague when applied but dries transparent so unexpected areas of the previous layers may get to show through.
The latest messy experiment has been to mix up a thick paste of this material and allow it to run down a small board at a steep incline. The paste runs slowly and dries so quickly that weighty, organic blobs dry in no time, hard as cement. Continuing with the theme, I'm going to pin the board to the wall as if it were a canvas and 'seal' the textured surface with one sheet of polythene. None of this is leading to any one finished object. I'm working fast, even for me - I'll just keep going.
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04/02/09
A new project.
This one is fine-art based and, I'm happy to say, very open to interpretation. We've been asked to investigate the concept of 'The Seeing Body'. The emphasis is on how the artist's tradition of depicting the human form has moved into areas that are less idealised and more physical. Pushing us in the modern direction, we've had examples of Mark Quin, Hans Bellmer, and Sarah Lucas waved in front of us.
I feel my hackles rise at some of the more slick treatment of this area by 'major' artists. There seems to be an excessive need to shock that's just a little too easy to invoke.
With that in mind, I've chosen to revisit material from an old sketchbook but treat it in a more childlike and manic way - I'm dealing with the open mouth once again. This time, I'm avoiding the visceral and exploring the iconic. I started to draw these 'muppet mouths' and very quickly saw the potential to exploit two elements. The first was that the clinical purity of the sphere belied the presence of a head or face. The second was the structure of the mouth interior was an archetype.
The relationships between colours and shapes within this mouth are visible in almost every fast-moving, colourful and violent children's television programme that has ever been made. There's a kind of manic glee to this mouth that is completely ambiguous and open to interpretation when presented in this barren, clinical sphere.
Initially, I knew that I wanted to fabricate this head and suspend it - divorce it from the body and gravity in one move. Now I'm at a stage of thinking about whether I should use this head as a primary source for some two-dimensional work. I have the sensation that this entity should be confronting itself somehow; observe itself in a mirror / painting. Would that image be distorted or pure?
In the studio, Alan (one of our invaluable technicians) has constructed a 4 foot stretcher for me. I've primed the canvas ready for a work in oil.
I have completed the 'head'. It has strayed very little from the initial sketches. Using two polystyrene hemispheres, cardboard and perfectly coloured foam, the large segmented sphere hangs in the studio. Tomorrow, I'll bring some torches, colour filters, laser pointers and my camera. I'm going to experiment with a few different images digitally and see what presents itself for the painting.
Ultimately, I think the canvas should be suspended in the same manner as the head. The viewer's experience of the combination of these two objects as installation should give rise to a variety of tensions. One may walk behind the canvas, behind the head or even between the two. I wonder what it would feel like to directly observe the painting while the open mouth silently hung inches from my back.
This is directly tying in to my consistent discomfort of being in galleries with other people. I have a kind of blind spot that disrupts whatever mechanism works between viewer and painting. Maybe this project will help.
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17/01/09
I'm in Dundee to resume the coursework and I'm really looking forward to it. Five weeks was an overly long break. Still, it gave me a little time to let my mind wander and do some bits and pieces of experimental work with oil. The vibrancy of the colours is so utterly superior to those of acrylics and the computer monitor - it was a joy to use them again.
These images are some of the moderate to large canvases that I have been working on. Many of them have no trace of a single brushstroke - the colours are simply running streams of highly diluted oil paint that was allowed to partially dry and then channels of turpentine were allowed to erase streaks. Once dry, the process was repeated.
For some time, I've passively observed a trend emerging in my images, a desire to allow chance effects to take control. It goes hand in hand with an urge to cloud (or give the impression of obscuring) the image. These smaller canvases are vaguely inclined to permitting these techniques the chance of creating a finished composition. I don't think they work. I'm thinking of adding wax paper and fibres to build up the surface but it feels like a quick fix somehow - as if the considered placement of a new medium would wrong-foot the possibility of a happy accident.
I completed one very large panel - completed in the sense that it has an apparent composition. This image has been reworked frequently over the last eight months. It is a rare example of a painting that has emerged without sketches, finished drawings or photographic work. It started as an image within an image, possibly some kind of cityscape. Colour was heavily applied with rough brushstrokes on to a surface already deeply textured with latex, sand, and shredded paper.
For the longest time I couldn't get it to work and I sent it, head bowed, to the small stack of 'difficulties' behind the easel. But every so often the urge would nag at me and I would start again. Finally, using wide, energetic brushstrokes to obscure a central column started to suggest a solution. I still see this painting as a suggestion of a window or aperture. Maybe it looks out upon a scene so stricken with light that there is nothing to observe. Maybe this relentless smearing of paint is what grabbed Gerhard Richter. For me, this is an outlandish way to work - to allow the process to be the subject and vice versa.
