As a student I knew there had to be some perks other than cheap bus fares.  Although I'm not so sure being on a packed bus squashed and squeezed and prodded and poked by a lot of virus ridden coughing, spluttering Christmas shoppers is a perk.  However, recently I think the perk was going to see (free of charge) the SGS drama students' theatre performance of Aladdin at the WISE campus.  My main intention was for my budding actress 10 year old to see it as she attends drama lessons, although I'm sure there is enough drama performances from her direction at home.  Anyway, I can only recommend to fellow students and other local Bristolians.  It was a fabulous show, it was funny, the students were very talented (Widow Twanky should have a special mention). I will definitely go and see the next performance.

School work 3rd entry

Continuing on from sculpture we have been looking at installation.  Mine is still a work in progress at this point.  Again thinking about space and what inhabits that seemingly empty space I have been creating models of viruses (generic) to install somewhere suspended in the college.  I also thought it might be fun.  Tiny worlds within worlds, and I believe nature has created duplicates of universes in different scales.  There seem to be parallels in nature for example, the look of a nebula looks like the close up view of an iris, microscopic structures look like other much bigger things and it goes on.  All apparently complying with a mathematical pattern, for example the golden ratio Fibonacci sequences that shape forms proportions and patterns in nature.

Plaster and wire virus

painted virus

I'm really keen for painting to play a large part in my future art work.  The painting session we had I found was not one of my most successful ones though.  This was mainly due to the fact that prior to this on my distance learning course I had been learning to paint with acrylics, oils being an impractical choice to use at home, (kids' inquisitive fingers and lack of space not being condusive to leaving paintings lying around for months to dry).  Anticipating the long drying time of oil paint I brought in some Alkyd fast drying ones in the hope I could use them more like I had learned to use acrylics.  I think an improperly prepared canvas and also lack of time to prepare something properly that I really wanted to paint further added to my lack of satisfying outcome.  I've since been reading some articles on oil painting as well as buying a great book by Kevin Macpherson called 'Painting with light and colour', and although he paints mainly landscapes the principles in it could equally apply to other subjects I'm sure.  Can't wait to have a try but research and writing seems to be getting in the way of creating art.  All but a couple of my paintings in acrylic I previously did had to be done from photographs but what I am really keen to gain experience in is painting from life.  It's more spontaneous, and I find photographs, although they capture detail, don't capture the light and colour the way the eye sees it.  I think working from life would give me so much more experience and understanding of colour.  I think also because I have had to rely on photographs so much I have tended to paint in a more technical and less responsive way.  This is an example of the type of painting I was doing before now:

self portrait Nov 2013

 I know I like narratives and again want to work figuratively.  I love people watching and want to capture life as I see it.  The humorous side, the injustices, the beauty, the not so beautiful, the differences.  The only problem i can see is getting the reference pictures without getting hit or arrested.  Ewing Paddock overcame this in his series of paintings of people travelling on the London underground by asking people to pose in his constructed carriage replica.

Schoolwork 2nd entry

I enjoyed sculpture sessions as I was able to bring some prior experience and knowledge and sometimes think it's easier to work in 3D.  Whereas in drawing and painting you are striving to create the illusion of something three dimensional.  Here we were required to sculpt a head in clay, roughly based on our own proportions.  Mine seems to have quite a thin neck for this reason and has resulted in quite an androgynous looking specimen as I think I was intending it male.  Also we were told to think about doing something else to it, maybe for example, add texture.  The idea was to then make a mould and subsequently a plaster cast.

I chose to make the mould with latex with a plaster casing for support.  I had a lot of thoughts on embedding something in the mould during casting to create a head cast that had chunks missing and appeared to be made of blocks, (based on my urban habitat thoughts of boxes and cubes which the built man made world seems to consist of).  I'd thought it would have been difficult to create neat cube like structures with the clay and the only way I could think of was to stick some cube like structures against the inside rubber of the mould to pull out of the cast later.  This would be difficult though as like I say, the neck was very narrow.  Based on my thoughts about space and how walls that we create delineate the space we inhabit, I was then thinking of slicing the cast head, omitting some of it and instead putting in something to indicate a wall.  As if the head had been able to inhabit the space within two separate rooms at once.  I thought cement fondue would be suitable for this.  Due to the given time scales though within our sessions I decided to instead look at finishes to apply to the head as this would be quicker.

Playing with different textures that could be applied to cast

I experimented with a few textures and as already mentioned in my first post had been thinking about disrupted lines and contour lines to indicate form.  I played around with sticking cotton thread in lines and liked this effect.

Idea for finish to head cast

I painted the cast in black ink as this would give a matt finish making it easy for the cotton to stick, and black, to make my white cotton thread nice and easy to see.  Then applying the cotton to the cast in an abstract contour type way before painting it with matt black enamel.  Finally picking out the texture and highlighting with a silver finish.

I'm really keen to further experiment with sculpture.  I'm also sure the bulk of it will be figurative work, for example the work of Anthony Gormley has a lot of resonance for me.  I'm interested in using other materials, resin for example and transparent materials and metal, not only for the interesting refraction of light but I want to explore the figure and challenge the sense of reality we have, and it not necessarily being the way it appears.

School work 1st entry

School work so far:

Well going back to school having been working on an art course at home has proved really quite a contrast, notably in the pace and the amount of work getting done.  Having not been in formal education for a very long time, and to have waited for this chance for an equally long time, I was expecting a faster paced, more demanding and perhaps old fashioned idea of art school with rigorous drawing sessions, painting and sculpting from life.

What we did do though, having been given the theme 'Urban habitat' was a series of workshops as a means of introduction to various mediums.  The most useful sessions to me were the print ones.  Partly as I had no experience of print other than mucky kid hand prints on the wallpaper at home, and also because I can now see a potential for its application in my work by way of lots of experimentation.  I think we have only just touched on the subject with some straight forward processes, but the subject seems a lot bigger than I expected with many more techniques and processes to discover.

First quick collograph print, by means of cutting into shellac-coated card with a scalpel:

Simple card collograph print

Here I discovered that a plate that has been previously inked appears to have more ink on than it actually does.  The first print was quite pale, and the second paler.  (Mental note to self made for future prints).

Again, a collograph print cut into card, which was done with the idea of also using a second plate with carborundum:

Collograph with carborundum print

This street scene at night which is very 'urban habitat'  was worked from a photo I took and seemed to lend itself to the dark tones I had seen in carborundum prints shown to us.  I was pleased to see that I was able to graduate the carborundum (which was mixed with PVA), by brushing it from the thickly painted area towards the light to try to create the atmospheric light I was hoping to achieve.  (I want to use atmospheric light in much of my work and love tonal contrasts.  I looked at Hopper's etchings and he uses the same sense of light that he does in his paintings).

(Made mental note to self after to remember image is reversed!).  This was an improved outcome, not perfect of course and somehow, even though I hadn't put any detail there, the car appeared to have acquired a wheel trim.  It's more usual for them to disappear in Bristol!  (I now had an idea of how much ink to leave on the plate too).  Wanting to try out as many techniques as I could I printed this again with a chine colle sky of purple tissue paper.

Chine colle tissue paper sky added to collograph with carborundum print

I like the idea that an even block of colour can be added so easily, even if it looks like the aftermath of a chemical attack.

I was itching to try an etching!

My idea for my etching was inspired by the

kitchen drainer.  (I'm a kitchen sink artist).

 quick sketch idea

The cups and dishes etc waiting for me to put them away appeared to me very like an urban landscape, so using kitchen implements, I set one up and photographed it.  

 This image I then etched onto my prepared hard ground on copper plate.

Etching

 I was more pleased with this print and loved the process of etching.  I'm sure I will do more etching as I do like detailed drawings in line.  I had brought in some coloured cellophane as I loved the look of the transparent colours so did the print again combining this layer of it.

Etching with yellow cellophane

Unless I was mistaken, I had cut it to the exact size but it appeared to have shrunk.


Whilst looking at etchings I discovered the beautiful delicate etchings of Morandi.

Linking in with the kitchen utensils I also looked at Graham Crowley's everyday household objects depicted in both a humorous and slightly sinister way.  I love these as I like the idea of looking at things from a slightly different angle,  I think this is something that I tend to do and want to incorporate in my own work.  Also I noticed he did some landscapes using uniform block colour which I likened to my yellow cellophane urban landscape.

Graham Crowley

Graham Crowley

Quite timely was an exhibition of artist's prints at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath.  I went along and had a look at these works by Matisse, Picasso, Dali and Warhol.  The descriptions included the methods used and they were very much their experimentations with print.  If I'm honest I didn't find them wildly exciting but found Dali prints the most interesting in that they were more detailed.


The recent embossing session tied in with where my thoughts had been going.  Having been thinking about the figure and its relation to space a lot, I was thinking of ways of indicating space around the figure rather than the figure itself.  This led to ideas of disrupted lines and contour lines.

I'd played with the image of a figure, including breaking it down into shapes of tone.  I used these shapes of tone in my embossing by cutting them out from a piece of card with the resulting embossing being an image that appeared to focus on the space with just the highlighted areas of the figure showing embossed, which to me, achieved an appearance of the figure piercing through that space, or semi merged with it.

Embossed image, although a bit difficult to photograph effectively

Thinking in terms of a less solid figure still and lines to indicate it I was playing with scribble to indicate tone that could then be transposed into either wire or glue to create an embossed image.

The hot glue was too thick though and even fine wire proved to thick to be able to go through the etching press.  Instead I created a simplified image to enable myself to try a wire embossing.

Wire embossing although a bit difficult to photograph clearly