It’s been a busy few weeks for me, but luckily I managed to spend some quality time in the studio, testing out some new ideas, making a start on three new paintings and deciding to re-visit and rethink some unsuccessful works.
It can be really daunting getting back into painting when you have had some time off, for personal reasons or just while focusing on written work, organisation and general life admin for a few days – all of the above applying to me this past week! – but I always feel so happy when I can free up a few hours or days to really throw myself into my painting and not think too much about it other than the process and materiality. So this is precisely what I have done this week, and I thought I would give you a little insight into what I’ve been up to…
One hour Works In Progress:
With my degree show approaching, I am beginning to start making decisions about which pieces of work I want to display, how they will work together as a collection and which pieces are ‘the best’. All this has made me feel a bit apprehensive about starting new works, in case they don’t fit with the works I currently have in mind for the degree show, or in case my paintings suddenly start to develop into a new style or theme that then clashes with my older paintings, some of which I definitely deem to be my favourite! In order to tackle this anxiousness around starting new work, I decided to set myself a challenge that would free up any concerns of perfection in new works and just get me back into painting. I decided I would make some paintings in just one hour, from image selection, canvas preparation to composition and physical painting, all must be done in one hour. The hope was that in doing so, I wouldn’t be worried if the paintings were untidy, or needed development, but at least they would be started and then I could decide which were worth working on more and how they might evolve to fit with some of my other pieces for my degree show. I have to say that the exercise was a great success, I created 5 new pieces, as well as multiple sketches and have found that two out of them may work perfectly for my degree show, even potentially without much further development!
I am so happy that I tried something outside of my usual painting routine, not only to motivate me to keep on painting despite the end of term approaching, but also just to remind me about the materiality of paint and the joy in the differences between individual works! I love that the drips and visible outlines reflect the painterly nature of the works, they leave a trace of my body in the painting process as well as the visual references to the body.
Calling it a day on unresolved works:
Another aspect of any artistic practice which can be difficult and daunting, is knowing when to simply give up on a painting. Don’t get me wrong, I believe massively that a painting requires hours upon hours of work, attention, reworking and developing and dedicating yourself to a work is incredibly rewarding when it does finally say what you wanted it to. For me, this often means revisiting a painting after weeks or months of not seeing it, or sometimes it simply means taking a few days off a piece to start on other paintings in order to loosen up before revisiting the initial work. However sometimes, it just isn’t right. No amount of repositioning, recolouring, turning upside-down, adjusting, layering or reworking will ever get the piece you are struggling with to the point you want. This is exactly what has happened with one of my paintings…
I began working on this piece about a month ago and could tell fairly early on that something wasn’t quite right. The piece was based off a cropped photograph from a playboy magazine and the image itself – as you can see below – had a wonderful light and vibrancy, as well as an interesting composition, that I thought would work beautifully as a painting. I proceeded to sketch from the picture, before beginning to paint on a pale blue canvas – which had, ironically, been painted over from another failed painting. In the first few layers, I wasn’t happy with my colour palette and felt that the hues I was using were to bold and bright to reflect the sun kissed tones of the original image, so I decided to leave the painting for a while and revisit it the following week, with fresh eyes. On doing so, I also realised that the proportions of the torso in the painting were not quite right, so while washing over the ‘too bold’ purples and blues, I also decided to trim back some of the outlines and create more white space. Doing so did seem to improve the composition and working into it with some more orangey, warm tones developed it further, but to my sadness, I just can’t seem to mimic the warmth and brightness of the photograph that inspired me to create this painting. So I made this decision to give up on this notion entirely.
Before repainting – the seemingly cursed – canvas for a third time, I did want to try out a few ideas that I had been considering for some of my other unresolved works, like applying dried paint chips, added collage or cut up elements, and as you can see below the paint chips added a new dimension to the work, which I think could be really interesting to develop with other pieces, but potentially on a smaller scale as I only have a small supply off recycled acrylic!
This entire process has once again assured me that there is no harm in trying something new, and particularly with this painting, I may find it more successful and interesting to break the rules a bit, maybe I will cut up and reassemble the failed canvas, maybe I will throw some fluorescent inks on top or stick on blown up sections of the original image. But either way, I am determined to not let the looming degree show make me play it safe, or stop me painting for fear of altering my chosen works.
Watch this space!