Trick or Treat?

I did this just for fun. watercolour and ink on Bristol board.

Loo rolls and toilety things

Being now in the half term break I've had a breather to gather my scattered brain cells, attend to various bits and pieces at home and now this,  my neglected blob.

Since being back at school my myriad thoughts have gravitated towards 'focus', 'perception', and 'time' whilst concentrating on the figure, namely the portrait - the human face.  Lots of ideas to follow up and investigate although for the last couple of weeks my intentions have been solely to create work for an upcoming exhibition.  We have to organise an exhibition for this Fine art course anyway.

The opportunity of a collaborative group exhibition in the Edwardian Cloakroom in Bristol meant

creating art work as a response to the venue.  The venue is an Edwardian toilet, a purpose built building with both a male and female side and their own entrances.  The Council now makes it available as an exhibition and art space.  It is however, still very, well,.......... toilety!.


Thoughts went into overdrive but I kept coming back to the history of the place and the 'time' aspect.  I researched Edwardian life and after reading about their reluctance to acknowledge their bodily functions, decided to embrace the whole toilet thing and started thinking about what I could do with toilet roll.  After all, no matter how advanced we think we have become we are still subject to these same basic animal activities, albeit things are a bit softer and more quilted these days.

The layers on a toilet roll made perfect sense to me as I see time as layers.  Time is after all a human concept but often thought of in a linear way.  However, it makes more sense to me to see time as layers.  The earth has layered strata relating to time scales, and history is created by adding more layers to it.  

Being in the old building I couldn't help but imagine and think about the many people that would have  passed through its doors.  I imagined ghostly echoes and images of faces.  White ghostly faces on white toilet paper made sense to me here.  Happy people that would have visited in between shows at the theatre that had been opposite at the time.  Maybe people visited as they felt ill or emotional.  It must all be here, ingrained in the fabric of the walls, the walls that are peeling, exposing layers. 

 I intended my work for the ladies side.  Maybe it's because I can relate more to this side but it also feels more comfortable here.  

Initially I thought about carving into toilet rolls, carving faces while at the same time cutting through and exposing layers.  These would be my layers of time.  Was there some sort of hardener I could soak them in to enable me to do this?  I could think of nothing and so proceeded to work out how I would create toilet rolls with faces in plaster instead, although not completely at peace with the compromise.  I had it pretty much worked out and then it dawned on me that these needed to be porcelain! Yes that was it! Hard and shiny like the toilets and basins.  It made perfect sense and I loved the idea of the contrast to fragile paper.

First toilet roll created

Bridget at college was a great help and recommended a suitable porcelain clay for me to buy.  It  is suitably white and incidentally has flax fibres in.  It meant though that due to the time scales of drying and firing etc I needed to get them all done within a couple of weeks.  I worked out and created card templates that I could cut around on rolled out clay.  A circular shape for the top and bottom, a rectangle that would create my inner tube and a rectangle for the outer of the roll, so they are effectively hollow.

Additionally (after much thought on how to achieve it), I added the rolled paper texture to the top and what would look like the loose end of the roll to the side.  I indicated lines of perforations and had considered quilted textures too but decided to keep it more simple to make the time scale.

 In all I have created six toilet rolls.  I call toilet rolls big marshmallows in my house as I'm sure the kids must eat them, it's the only way to explain the rate they disappear.  (They'd break their teeth on this lot)

 I decided I needed at least six or seven to cover any breakages in the kiln as I wasn't convinced that I didn't have trapped air in at least the last joins when I put the tops on.  This is because I couldn't apply too much pressure here or the whole thing may have warped.

Two more examples whilst still wet clay.

Well, fingers crossed and they will survive firings and glaze.

To be continued..................

                                                               

Kev (a portrait of my psychic medium brother)

'Kev' Acrylic on canvas board, 60 x 74cm

It's turning into a family thing.

Well at the end of college in the summer I decided to start a painting that I’d promised little bro months ago.  One day I found him doing his thing (he’s a very talented psychic medium), at a mind body spirit type venue, although I’m banned from going to anywhere he does his stand up audience thing as I might be off putting,….. apparently.  I can’t see how clapping, jumping up and down, whistling, and cheering loudly can be off putting in a quiet spiritualist gathering, (only joking,……. but I am proud of him).  Anyway, he had a table at this venue and I’d suggested it would be a nice idea to have something on the wall behind him and we decided a portrait would be good.  I took a few snaps there and then as he is generally hard to pin down.

The pictures from that day weren’t great I felt, mainly because of the light.  There was the artificial light of the hall he’d been in and the daylight from a near window.   

Anyway, again working from photos I wanted to avoid being a slave to them and at the same time wanted to try to portray a feel of little bro and make a painting that also acted as a kind of advert for him, making people want to approach him for a psychic reading.  I kept this in mind and treated this as if it was commissioned that way.

Well, stuck with the two directional light issue I decided I would use this to try to create a spiritual feel as bro is a very spiritual person.   I wanted to convey this along with his kind, empathic and friendly character.

After doing some compositional contemplation and then coming back to my original idea like usual, I tried to loosely put down some tones.  

I’d tilted the whole composition to make him less direct and add to the casual, friendly feel I was trying to achieve, and by doing this the table edge created an interesting angle which I thought contrasted with the roundness of the ball.  The ball I wanted in the frame but not a focal point hence it’s a bit outside of the canvas. I suppose the pose is quite a traditional portrait composition and the face hands and ball create a triangle.  Although the face is directly looking at the viewer, this is softened by the tilt and by being off centre.  This I decided was the painting where I would finally get loose and more spontaneous.  Well that was what I thought then, now I’m thinking, Kim you did it again!, …although it is looser than some previous work so I’m guessing this is a long slow process of gradual undoing and experience.  Whilst painting this I decided if I could talk to any artist I would like to talk to Rembrandt and Monet.  Rembrandt had it nailed when it comes to portraits and Monet had his colour and light sussed. (Maybe I should develop my psychic abilities and see if I can channel them).

Well during the school hols any hope of doing artwork or having a train of arty thoughts went out the window.  I was glad that little sproggie was back to school before me so I have been working all out to get this done.

My intention was to make bro’s face and hands the focal points.  I was well aware that he didn’t want his face to look red.  (Auburn haired people often have this skin tendency).  At the same time I wanted his face to look warm and glowing especially with the artificial light catching one side.  The biggest problem I had was the background really which I kept changing by applying glazes.   To help with the glow to the face and bringing the face in front of the background I thought ‘equilluminance’ and ‘complimentary’ hence the greeny/blue hue next to the right ear for example.  I found myself having to mute the tones on the crystal ball (I suspect it’s there just as a stage prop, and anyway, he doesn’t have the accompanying head scarf and dangling earrings) and had to dilute the contrasts and hightlights or it would have been too distracting from the figure even though it was foreground. 

At one point I found the whole composition looked too cold for my liking and I had kept the background muted and relatively cool to add depth but I realised by warming the areas of background against the cool shirt tones it not only added balance, but by contrast also helped to add a touch of depth separating the figure and background.  I also darkened it a little especially on the lighter side of the face, again to add depth and separation of figure from background.  (This is something Andrew Loomis mentions in his book Creative Illustration.  I would recommend this book. It’s an old-ish book and although the title is ‘illustration’, this was written in the era when adverts were paintings and works of art in themselves.)  Of course having made up the background it meant I had to invent the reflections in the crystal ball.  (That kept me busy for a while).

A friend of mine says working on a painting is very much ‘push and pull’ and during this painting I understood what he meant. It was a case of trying to create depth and feel whilst also trying to keep the focal points on what I intended.  The background, which has had various modifications, and is supposed to give a spiritual feel, now reminds me of a nebula.   Having your head in the stars is not a bad thing and I think I will call it a day on this one or I will fiddle forever with it.  Somehow, I also think my paintings look more like illustrations than ‘proper’ paintings.  Maybe it’s the medium?  The fact it’s from photos? Maybe they are too literal? Well this year I need to come out of my acrylic comfort zone and use oils. My main concerns have been composition, colour, tone and more recently colour temperature.  I think now I need to look at light and be aware of this as a compositional factor and a way of moving the eye around a painting.  This may help overcome some of the issues and the ‘push and pull’ I experienced with this one.

'Kev' 60 x 74cm acrylic on canvas board