MA Week 26 - reflection on the last two weeks

Reflection on the last two weeks – 9^th May 2016

May has definitely felt better than April, and I am getting back into gear with both practice and critical thinking. It would be nice to say I’ve made good progress, but that’s probably overstating it… however, I have made progress.

Over the past couple of weeks I got back into the print room and did some more monoprinting. This time I used the arm rest as Lyndon had advised. I found it difficult to get a continuous line as the arm rest got in the way. I wonder if I should try a smaller piece of paper (A5?). However, the results were much better without me inadvertently rubbing my hand over the paper as I moved the pencil. I continued with the pylon theme, though I completely failed to blot the paper enough the first time round, but this still gave an interesting effect. I also had a go with some grey paper that had just arrived and this gave a nice “industrial” feel. I also had a “doodle” to see what effect I could get from rolling the pencil or deliberately rubbing the paper with my fingers.

 

Pylon monprint on grey paper

I reached a point where I decided to have a think about how to work into the prints. I had a bit of a creative block about this but eventually decided to try a bit of red acrylic and to think about the shapes within the pylons. This worked OK but seemed to go much better when I tried some looser, more fluid marks over the paper which had become textured from being inked by rolling the pencil. I think I will ink some papers this way simply as a background for working upon. Some of the shapes also looked a bit “Chinese”, which wasn’t totally unexpected as the abundance of items made in China is part of my theme of the decay of British Industry.

 

Monoprint/acrylic experiments

In the same delivery as the grey paper, I received some drawing nibs and decided to have a go with these. A couple of people (my tutor and a couple of classmates) had mentioned that my notebook could be an artwork as the writing is small and even. I had been resisting writing about my work on all fronts as part of challenging myself to priortise the visual, so using it in artwork seemed untenable. Anyway I decided to do a piece of free writing about writing onto one monoprint. It really loosened my mind. It occurred to me that I will freely admit that I think in words – so why don’t I make the words work for me, rather than allow myself to be dominated by them? By writing, visual creativity somehow opened up. This may well have been in part because I was using a new writing/drawing instrument, and also because I was writing in red ink rather than my beloved black. But it was at least in part because the free writing turned into critical thinking about whether the writing was subverting the artwork, or vice versa. From now on I will write as I did in the last two terms, but just not as much. Then I can see more about what I’m doing and why and where it’s going next, but not get overwhelmed.

Writing about writing

 I still wasn’t sure what to do about the monoprints so I cut up one of the grey ones and put it back together fairly randomly, then looked for new connections and marks I could make. The lines are rather thin, and the larger square seemed to fall neatly into four quadrants, but I could immediately see that I could work this up into perhaps some small acrylic pieces.  I hope I can get onto producing them this month, then they could go into the WIP show on 10^th June.

 

Re-purposed pylons

Also in my delivery of art treats were some etching needles, and I have etched a pylon into an A5 drypoint plastic, but alas I didn’t get time to print it. So that can be part of next week’s creative practice.  Progress and a way forward… didn’t seem possible in April!