Saturday 18 February 2017

Making finished work & a moment in passing time.

Work gifted me with two long enough train journeys to have a think about how to produce more finished work as I've become frustrated by the amount of work that I have been abandoning. I thought a good place to start, would be to define what I think of as (my) finished work, so I attempted to mind-splurge and this is what I came up with.


'Can hold a conversation' means a conversation with the viewer - I don't want to dictate a meaning, there must be room for a good chunk of translation 'it looks like...'. 

Talking to other work' means that this work doesn't exist in a vacuum, but within a body of work and hasn't gone off at a tangent. I want to feel that I've got a sense of progression; towards what exactly I don't know, but I need to feel that I've moved on somehow from my last piece of work. I do like tangents, and I want to be following them down, but I don't want to be captured by a stray lighting-bolt one that burns out too quickly. The piece has to be staying on a track.

'Balanced. Form + colour.' Self-explanatory. Well, I could put this one in the middle also.

'Proud to share'. Again, self-explanatory.

'Is 'mine''. That I've not captured another's artist's style. I do have a dominant style which is quite delicate and I've worked hard to embolden my colours and lines while maintaining that delicacy. I try out other artist's styles to try and learn their techniques and improve my own and they can sometimes stick for a while. So I need to be mindful that I am in fact on the track, and not still learning a technique.

'Captured spontaneous response'. It's got to be fresh, it has to be authentic to my feelings - my response to a place in a particular moment. I also wrote this in a different way, although to me it means the same thing as 'A moment in passing time'. I'm just going to type up what I wrote in my sketchbook about that at the time and then see if I still agree with what I wrote.
Why do I say a moment in passing time rather than a 'passing moment in time'? Are they not the same thing?It's just an exchange of words but they do have a different meanings: different types of instances of perception, experiences of a moment.A 'moment of passing time' holds within the phrase a concept that there will be, inevitably, another moment, and another after that, etc. beyond me, my time; the time of my kind.A 'passing moment' is one that (to me) captures a moment and holds it. The emphasis being more on the moment not the nature of time which is to mark change. Everything one looks at stops with a captured moment, and I want a sense of time's endlessness. However, I don't want to get too wrapped up in that small definition, just hold it in the back of my mind and let it form my intuition.
Well, I guess the problem I form for myself is that an image made can not move on in time, it is captured in response to the original inspiration, it can only be of itself and move onwards as an object / document. But that's an artwork and what I'm in the business of making. So I don't want to get wrapped up in it as a concept. It's just a small part of what makes me feel a work is complete and finished.

I think part of what makes me abandon work; well, I have two things going on here. Work that I know is failing and needs to be moved on from, and work that is succeeding but needs so much attention that in order to succeed that I get bored and distracted from it. I think it's a case of mindset. I do find that the further away I get from that moment of intuitive response the more wooden works become and they fail, and I resent the time lost making them and I slam the door on them (Typical INFJ door slammer) and go off in search of something else, and so I don't ever get deeper.

That is certainly what is in danger of happening with the tree forms I have been working with for a week and a half. The first set in watercolour were floaty but bold. I felt they needed grounding so I brought in the Payne's Grey acrylic ink lines to mostly just two watercolour shades and the second set made the next day were bright, bold, clear, and they had immense life. Partly that was because I let the ink drift into very wet watercolour because I love the effect - the colour lives for itself for a bit.

Then I experimented with the letting colour live on top of a dried ground of dirty ink pot water so I could get the lovely grainy effect. The result was more meditative tones of grey and muted Cad Yellow, Aliz and Ultra in more abstracted lazy shapes which I was pleased with and couldn't wait to get back to after a few days away.

When I got back I successfully added more layers of ink pot water to the lazy shapes, but I spent the majority of the day working into the shapes I saw and creating a larger painting which was meant to be a combined response from both the original sketches, and the work created since, and that hasn't been so satisfactory. 

Looking at them blue-tacked to the wall in consecutive order they get darker and darker over time, like a moment fading from memory. The middle ones are the most satisfying. 

So I think, in all, as a means to examine my practice and potentially eliminate waste, this has been a very useful exercise. Starting a work with the idea in mind that it will be somehow a culmination is a mistake and show me abandoning that sense of a moment in passing time. Getting out of the house and going out to get more sketches would help. Holding on to the sense of a moment in passing time could be key. I have a load more paper just delivered so I can get bigger.







Saturday 11 February 2017

New work - sketches from the nature reserve in Leamington

I've been thinking about writing this blog for a while, mostly because I've begun a new skein of thought and it's good to get thoughts down. Typically this has struck while I have other work on, only allowing me moments to work on getting ideas down on paper, but this often happens with me.

I made the most of an unusually warm day this week to explore the local nature reserve when I had finished up work and had a couple of hours before the school run. I took my sketchbook and tiny watercolour kit, snowdrops were flowering and the light filtering through the trees cast a lovely light -dashes of brilliant green among the purple trees. I found a handy fallen tree trunk to sit on and did a really quick watercolour sketch to capture the colours, without thinking too much about the forms, and then a more detailed and more close up sketch of the central older tree flanked by saplings.

It was still cold and I was fighting off a bug (it got me since) so I didn't want to stay too still for long and get chilly, and capturing the form afterwards would allow the watercolour time to dry. So that was the reason for splitting the colour and form over 2 pieces. At least that was the excuse at the time, but now I am thinking more about that decision as it has sparked off a new thread.  Now, I have to be careful of giving new ideas time because I am plagued by them. I am too easily distracted from finishing a nearly done piece by a new and interesting idea. I am not surrounded by finished works, more like piles and piles of sketches and experiments. I have been on the search for a long time for a working method that will allow me to both experiment and produce works that I can perceive as finished, if not actually final: pieces that contain the same spontaneity as the original sketches.

This instance, however, is interesting because it's the first time ever that I have gone back to use sketches as reference material in order to produce other work that seems as fresh and spontaneous as the first does. Spontaneity of line and colour is always what I feel is missing in the works that I abandon. I want to capture that feeling of being in the moment of perception. The light, and sense of imminent movement; that it's all going to change again. I think it's a sense of the UK's ever changing weather and light - if that doesn't sound too highfalutin. It seems silly that I've made this huge discovery now - I do know of the process artists use of making sketches, bringing them back to the studio and working on them further. Other artists on my Fine Art degree course did exactly that, and it seems strange for me to admit that I didn't, but the process didn't make sense to me; I seemed to get more than enough grist out of the ideas teeming in my head and I wondered why friends would seem to struggle for inspiration. I honestly look back and think it was a case of me being unable to see the wood for the trees. I didn't feel I needed a similar process, then, but I am beginning to see the value in it now. This maybe a case of maturity. :-)

So it's maybe a case of collecting material, sort of clues, that remain unfinished enough for me to pick up the threads of inspiration from them again at a later time.

I have spent the last 6 months experimenting with acrylics and gesso on canvas, trying to get used to a thick medium and fabric, after being used to watercolour and paper for so long, and along the way I discovered acrylic ink and india ink, again. Now I'm back to using watery mediums again and it does feel a little like I've come full circle.

Anyway, so getting thoughts down does help, at least a little bit. So these are the original sketches I made.

And these are the 6 quick sketches I did from them. I don't know how long they took, but they were fast. They are water colour and acrylic ink - Payne's Grey which is a little watered down and I've used a wooden stick to make the marks with. I do love the way the ink fragments into the colour. It is very difficult to control the effect, but I like that. The challenge is, I think, to scale up, as these are small, about 12cm x 20cm.


These are my favourites of the 6. I have to maybe think up some words to go with them. I love the combination of ultramarine, alizarin crimson and the ink.



I was inspired to scale up, but I went too large and there was not enough paint. I ended up flipping it on its side, smearing some gesso on and drawing some bird shapes. It's unfinished and will probably remain so in this format. I think there may possibly be a way forward in cutting up into smaller drawings and working further on those. But, back to family and paying work while I mull it over. I am usually reluctant to publish ones I'm not happy with but this is part of the 'process' that I'm experimenting with and doing this may help me stay on track.

Thank you for reading this far and please do leave comments.