#assessmenttask2

Instructions for navigating my blog. 

On Tumblr, the posts are shown as the most recent post at the top, therefore to view the work from start to finish you will have to scroll to the bottom of the feed. 

Under my name you will see a horizontal list of headings, each of these heading will take you to a different page (titled).

Posts - This will most likely be the page that you are already on, this is a complete list of every single post that i have made. 

Assessment task 1 - Studio book and all other informative work, pretty much every single post can be seen under here.

Assessment task 2 - My proposal, statement of intent and revised statement of intent. 

Resolved work - In this area i have included any piece of work that i view as resolved from this module. 

Archive - This shows you a brief overview of every post.

Engrossed by the human form, my ideas around the body have shifted from my muse to my ‘medium’; using my body to illustrate the integral first steps of my paintings that are deeply informed from my work informed concept. I use paint as my final outcome to explore everyday routines, rituals and movement; this being the core context to the work. 

I am interested in movements, of all kinds, and how that can be depicted through art via the use of gesture within paint and how different paints and other household supplies can perform this. I explore my sense of self through my work and how this can be implemented into my paintings in reserved ways. I enjoy work that can be open to the interpretation of others with no clear meaning without explanation. 

My main aim within this module was to carry on the body of work that I had started in second year by continuing my exploration of Psychogeography. It felt right. I felt that I had finally found the subject for all of my work. My studies started with my immediate surroundings, focusing on specific sounds, objects, smells and movements which all carried through into the theme of routines and rituals and how they interacted.  

In my statement of intent I wrote how I intended to contrast last year's work by flipping the scenery, and after reading more into Psychogeography and its common referral to the ‘exploration of urban environments’, I started to base this module's work within the home.

Influenced by the layout of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizios ‘Industrial Paintings’, I worked with rolls of paper to map movements around my home in a new way, physically. I focussed on the impressions made onto the paper as a result of direct contact; much like how Richard Long created ‘A Line Made by Walking’ 1967. I further accentuated these marks by applying layers of watercolour paint, charcoal and oil sticks.

To fully achieve a sense of self through my work, I changed my direction to my bedroom. 

Intrigued by the impressions left on paper, I tried this again only differently, now using my body as the instrument. I did not intend for these to be viewed as body prints, like Yves Kleins ‘Anthropometries’, but instead as still life movements; a photographed period of time. I wanted to play with the contrast between movement and static and how they can work together. I repeated this process by incorporating the prints into my everyday routines, looking at the fluid movement of standing and sitting to produce a print and drawing their titles out of the locations and times that they were made, linking everything back to their origin. I wanted everything to move fluidly, all pieces of work linking back to one another to show a clear path of where the work began. I progressed with all of these aspects to create my final body of work, using my prints to inform my painting. Working with polyfilla to accentuate depth and folds similar to the paper, I finished the work with two layers of satin varnish. This allowed enough shine for light to bounce off of the painting without a glare that would take away from the shadows and depth that I had worked to achieve.

I had stripped colour from my paintings at an early stage to rid the work of any colour induced connotations that people were drawing at. I reverted to white as a clean slate. This lack of colour became an issue when people started to view the work as a material based process. I needed to add a component to the work to create a shift that would allow for the marks upon the white to be more dramatic to the eye. I was drawn back to the research I had done on Robert Ryman and how he used the metal mounting brackets as a piece of his paintings. I aimed to work with this idea by applying slats of timber, sanded till smooth, and painted in my common choice of complementary colours, pink and turquoise. Working with the timber allowed me to see how one thing can affect the work. I painted the wood in strips, leaving some areas raw, so that each view-point allowed for different visibilities. I finished with a matte top coat to further contrast the glossy finish of my paintings. The wood was applied with half inserted screws. I want this to make the audience aware of the uncertainty that I had whilst applying this onto my paintings. Contrast was the main goal here and I am confident that I achieved it in all areas.

This module enlightened me to how important the concept of my work had started to become, with the paintings and the concept working together to support and inform one another in a way that could not be achieved alone. Reading Sol Lewitts ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 1967, helped me confirm this. I feel confident progressing in this direction and aim to expand my knowledge on the topic to inform my work.  

‘When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art", 1967).

To push my ideas to their limits, I will be continuing these concepts until they are exhausted. I want to explore colour and the contrast that can be achieved between them within my paintings and how this can promote aspects of the work whilst creating a greater sense of balance. I want to look deeper into common art supplies in combination with household mediums. I aim to continue my study of movement and self by using my drawings to inform my paintings, working on a larger scale so that I can fully body the gesture and movement of a piece of work. I will experiment more with the relationship between pieces, how they can interact with one another via common aspects that travel through each piece of work. This will be one of my main focal points for my degree show. 

I look forward to being able to incorporate my ideas from my dissertation into my studio practice, blending together my work from the indoors and outdoors, which is something I had to steer away from this time around and I look forward to the direction this may take me. 

Quickly revisited the latter part of my original statement of intent: 

Working in an abstract manner whilst trying to include a sense of self and reality within my work, I will be mapping the areas of which are most commonly used to travel around my house. Mapping this on paper will then allow me to transfer these on to other materials when the time feels right to move to a more sturdy and finalised piece of work - This will be my rough work that leads on to the better which is a crucial process for how I will develop and produce this body of work. My life drawing studies will also begin to inform this too through the style in which I do my line studies.

Prior to my last module, all of my University work has been based around the female form and the landscape that it holds within itself, that was until the final module of second year when a large proportion of my work was made within full lockdown restrictions. I investigated the rituals and repetition of this new everyday life, predominantly my own, collecting items and materials along the way. More importantly, as i dug deeper into my topic, i began to draw my focus on the walks, bike rides and runs that i was doing which were the only things drawing my out of my house. I looked at the maps that i was making within these and started to retrace these within my art work working layer upon layer to prolong the sense of repetition. I began to understand that I needed to maintain a sense of self within my works, but upon discussion with tutors, I realised that it was there all along, i was using myself and my sense of direction to map out the lines that were soon to become my art work.

One important aspect from my most recent module was how I tracked my walks and movements. I used an app called Strava that mapped out my movements for me showing exactly where I went and where it was on a physical map; this was tracked via GPS. To follow this, I find it crucial to work roughly first, sketching out ideas and designs in order to find out what it is that I actually want to be doing, it gives me time to experiment whilst also putting me into a more creative mindset which I normally struggle with. For this stage I enjoy working in watercolour paints, acrylic paint, my newly found gouache paints and more often that nor charcoal and chalks, whilst focusing mainly on  the colour palette black and white. I always stick to a few muted palettes within my work, normally red hues, white and black.

As I worked in more of an abstract manner during my last module, this was new to me and it felt almost like an instinct so it is my main area of focus for this year that I want to dig deeper into. Whilst also maintaining the ideas of psychogeography in my practice as this was a major part of how my finalised pieces came together last term. The main struggle that I am going to find here is that I don't seem to get out as much here whilst in Plymouth as I do at home in Barnsley; however this could definitely be a changing point for this. However as i will still be looking into repetition and rituals, this would also be a good time to look for these in different areas of my life, for example, the routes taken around my house on the daily.

I will also be using our life drawing sessions as a time to map the form in the same way as my mapped pieces, using chalk and a single line drawing with no need for the figure to become a realistic and understandable form.

Towards the end of the module, I imagine that I will be working with oil paints and emulsion, hopefully on a larger scale. I really enjoyed working on a large scale for my last module too so this is something that i'm willing to explore, but i would also like to do more canvas work both loose and stretched. Prior to this I will do the majority of my experimental pieces in charcoal, acrylic paint and watercolour paint as they are cost effective but also materials that i know how to work with in this given area. I have also recently invested in some gouache paints so I am hopeful that I will be able to incorporate these somewhere, especially within my life drawing studies. I think that life drawing will be a very important part of my studies this year as I begin to look at the form in a new way and with a different style of drawing.

Tracey Emin: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/27/tracey-emin-my-bed-violent-mess-sex-death

Ned Kelly: http://www.ironoutlaw.com/

The Grand Budapest Hotel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZR5ebXUMXM

Assessment Task 2 - ‘Major Project’

Inspiration / Research #2 | ‘Ned Kelly: Australian Iron Outlaw’ (Artist & Date Unknown)

Assessment Task 2 - ‘Major Project’

Inspiration / Research #1 | Tracey Emin ‘My Bed’ (1998)

Assessment Task 2 - ‘Major Project’

Experiment #2 | Moving Image + Black and White

While this footage and animation WAS used for an assignment in Media Arts Gateway earlier this semester, I have since been fascinated by how this kind of animation could be reinterpreted to fit the ADAD binaries question, as well as my ongoing theme of film/visual medium in terms of Art and Design. This is a rotoscoping of a heavily-edited scene from the 2014 film ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ by visionary filmmaker Wes Anderson. The final work was submitted with colour, shading, background details and music/sound, however as I was experimenting with how the binaries of light & dark/black & white work to benefit a work, I decided to go back to this assignment and change up a few things. I added a pure white background rather than a coloured/transparent one, and added some more cross-hatching and blackened details to fit a more comic strip, cartoon aesthetic. I was thinking I could use this to further highlight how impactful whites and darks are in communicating themes/messages in film/TV, perhaps by rotoscoping over a scene from ‘Heaven Sent’, capturing Rachel Talalay’s gorgeous use of shadows and silhouettes to craft a suspenseful, mysterious scene. I would use a technique very similar to this, albeit with likely less details and cross-hatching, as I would want it to focus purely on the lights and darks, using nothing except what is and isn’t obscured by darkness to tell a short story, highlighting the unparalleled importance of this binary that is and has been present in both Art and Design AND the real world as a means of visual communication. I ultimately decided this idea was both a little simplistic in terms of thesis and linkage to the question, as well as the actual animation and rotoscoping itself taking far too long to be effective enough by the due date.