Course notes Oct 17

This post is going to comprise mostly of my thoughts following my first tutorial.

This is the first artwork 'Sunset at Chesterton Mill' I've completed since then. Not sure if I'm going to continue in this way exactly, but the process really seems to help me though to the end of a work, so I will be hanging on to that.

Main thoughts were that I should in somehow carry on in my current mode and experiment with scale and possibly texture. We talked about how I drew until I reached a point of recognition of a memory; not particularly somewhere I've seen more a melting together of moments, and now I consider it, that's what happened with this painting/drawing.

I had intended to fill in the whole shape with architectural forms in graphite, chalk & koh-i-noor leads and I'd been at that for 2 days, then there was a point when I looked at it and I slightly recognised the upright and left-leaning thick lines - which were being worrying me until then - as the legs of Chesterton Mill.

The Mill is a C16 building on top of a hill near home where I've done some sketching; you can see a long way from it but I'd become fascinated by the patina on the stone. I took my small family there on the last weekend of the summer holidays to watch the sun go down because you can't see it from my house and it was a warm night. It was something unusual to do together to mark the end of the summer break, and it was free. We obviously weren't the only ones with the idea because there were plenty of people there and the place had a nice atmosphere. Teenagers larking about, people and dogs, photographers with cameras on tripods. My 5 year old daughter had a fun time running around the soy-bean field and mill in the half-light.

As soon as I realised this the painting came together and finished really quickly. Now I've come to naming it - naming is important to me, the words create a complementary picture - so, I'm thinking it could be called 'Sunset at the old mill', or 'Sunset at Chesterton Mill' as above. And it really pleases me that I've ended up with a painting that looks entirely different to what a painting called the same name might have looked like 100 years ago.

There is a part of it that is about being inside and outside the house. A house is all corners and framed vision; you are always looking through doorways as you move around a house, which you constantly do. Outside, particularly from a viewpoint like this, you can literally see for miles, it really frees your mind, and you take some of that with you when you go back home. I was going to call it 'inside / outside / inside' or something like that to map our little trip out.


Other notes.
Advised to look at art of Paul Noble & Charles Avery who create worlds via drawing - leads me to reconsider a direction my artwork was taking about a year ago that I discarded then because it seemed too unusual.

And, although I intend to look at scaling up, I did this little experiment. Acrylic on a scrap of mount board. I like that I can't control the paint too much and it really is a shape incised out of the background - somehow that's important, don't know why.