Mae Anderson

February 2021

Tim Knowles workshop

Tim ran a two-part workshop where he did a talk on his practice and journey to where he is now, and then a workshop a few days later with some fine art students and us investigating vectors and thinking about space. Beforehand, we had a task to produce some drawings thinking about space, line, vectors inspired by the work he had shown us in his talk.

I particularly loved his drawing "machines" - especially the postal drawing where the pen had been attached to paper in a box and then posted through the mail.

Tim Knowles workshop

These are drawings of the physical line I would make if I walked through my house, my grandma's house and my auntie's house (in order from the left to right).

I made these using a clipboard and I did a physical walk through my house, each move I made documented by a movement with the chalk. I chose chalk as nothing else really shows on black paper. The colours were chosen through intuition - I just felt the peachy colour was right for my house.

The aim of the Ken Stradling Collection book project is to document a Pandemic daily visual diary in 5 concertina books with 7 pages each. I haven’t started drawing in any of the books yet but I have started thinking about how I want the books to look. 

This is a drawing I made using oil bars on paper of the imaginary layout of the upstairs of my house. I cut up the image and was arranging it to consider potential layouts for these books and thinking about the individual marks in each small piece.

I’ve been particularly inspired by some pieces of work by Yann Kebbi, Stuart Shils and Patrick Heron at the moment - they all utilise the hastily drawn boarder and content. Kebbi is an illustrator but Shils and Heron are painters and used their drawings as sketches for their paintings. Shils paints American landscapes and Heron painted his home and environment. All three artists use colour emotively in their more “finished” pieces of work - but all of these drawings are monotone in either pen, pencil or charcoal. 

Yann Kebbi c. 2013. 

Stuart Shils

Playing with composition, backgrounds, formatting, layering.

Love love love the shaped cut-out on top of the pink!!!

All of the books I have made previously - they are ALL concertinas! I discovered them on my foundation course and have been fascinated ever since...

Book One (top left), Book Two (top right), Book Three “Endless” (middle), Book Four (bottom left), Book Five (bottom right)

Books One and Two were made from drawings I had done surrounding my workshop from Tim Knowles. 

Book Three “Endless” was made from scraps from my local rag called the Express and Echo newspaper. I felt like doing something a little tongue-in-cheek, to show how the days literally feel endless to me during lockdown. The whole brief of the Stradling Pandemic Diary series is to document my life - well a week can feel like 30 days long but also 4 days long at the same time. All the pages I used were Covid-orientated because it feels like it’s all we hear about nowadays. 

A video of the original Book Three “Endless”

It did have 3 inserts of newspaper articles but as you can see in the video it was a bit too chaotic especially considering I couldn’t figure out a way to post it to the collection without damaging it. 

Book Four

7th to 13th April 2021

The idea of this was the idea of contribution. I was inspired by a similar painting I had done from semester 1 but this idea was a little different. Each cup was added to my bedside table naturally over the course of a couple days. I painted these cups and thought yep this is cool I like it. 

But to be honest I wasn’t 100% sold. It seemed a bit boring - so I decided to chop it up and turn it into a book for the Stradling Collection project. I LOVE the effect the cross section of this painting gives and the discombobulated feel from each page is just lovely. 

I ripped up the rest of the painting and photocopied the remains. Then I ripped up the photocopy and stuck it back together and photocopied it again. In the far right of the final image I have drawn over the top with charcoal. 

Monoprints thinking about cut-outs. 

Really love this colour palette. I’m not sure on the blue painting being used as a cut-out, I think I prefer a plain blue. 

Added charcoal to this one but I really don’t like it.

Prep for a painting. 

I used buff titanium acrylic on 2 pieces of prepped MDF. Each piece is 1.5m by 1.5m.

I basically ran out of paint haha so I struggled to cover the entire piece but actually I think that was the right idea. I love the dripped down, half done effect and the idea of carelessness and simplicity from it. With the paper cut outs, I can only get a limited amount of texture because paper is so smooth, but with this painting, I can utilise the drips and sloppy nature of the paint and experiment with coverage and transparency.

The painting. I love it!

Its simplistic, effective, massive. It’s drippy and messy and just really graphic and exactly what I was aiming for. 

Inspired by the loopy humpy print I did. Colour inspired by the paper blue/black cut out I did. 

All together the length of the paintings is almost 3m - I decided to do use a piece of MDF cut in half, because I want to emulate the segments I’ve been thinking about. I think it worked really well with this pair of paintings, because it just disrupts the way your eyes see the shapes. Makes me think about Heron, Shils and Kebbi and the concepts of boundaries.