MA Week 30 - Ready for the end of year exhibition

Reflection on the past two weeks – 7^th June 2016

Ready for the end of year exhibition!

I can’t believe it is already two weeks plus since I last posted a blog. Most of the time has been devoted to working up the four acrylic boards from the pylon monoprint, ready for the end of year show. They are definite works in progress, which is what we are being invited to exhibit, and I can see lots of improvements I can make. But they’re hung on the wall, and that’s the main thing. 

I picked up working on them on 26^th May. I’d already done a second acrylic sketch for the black and the red pieces and I started them on the MDF board (each 20x20cm). The black sketch had got too busy and I sought to simplify it. I also decided to reduce the amount of masking and layering in the red piece.

The red piece worked OK, perhaps not as good as the sketch, but better than the original. The masking and marking didn’t come off quite as well as I’d hoped. I think using this technique for a resolved piece would need quite a lot of painting onto transparencies to understand how the layering would look when you take off the masking tape.  My classmate Mel had suggested that the black piece looked like lights emanating outwards, and I took up this idea in the final version of this. It’s much neater and cleaner than the sketch and I think it works quite well.



Sketching in progress

Over the weekend I worked on the sketches for the two blue pieces and started the boards based on these. Things didn’t go too well when I peeled off the masking tape for the diamond image and it (the tape) had stretched and curved, meaning I had to start again – but such is life. Throughout doing the boards, I experimented quite a lot on a test board with modelling paste and with adding depth by using layers of transparent colour. In the end I decided against the modelling paste as it’s white, and was adding too much white to the colours, weakening them and altering them too much. However, I made some nice marks with them, and I will pick up that mark making again as I think it needs further investigation.

Of the four, the blue diamond worked up best after the initial nuisance. Some of the textures from the painted lines are a little too textured (uneven or imbalanced), but it has some nice layers in it (as suggested in the crit) and plenty of ideas for future work.  The other blue and yellow piece didn’t work up as well as the sketch. I think I chose the wrong content and positioning for the little “mini-paintings” that sit within the overall painting. But, as I said, it’s a work in progress.

 

Pylons I - IV

In all of these I found that I need to improve my brush control, and I need to find out more about how I stop the brush losing its point and having little hairs split away (it might be that I am handling them too roughly when I wash them). Some of the energetic lines worked better than the others, and sometimes it depended on how tired I was. Some of the sketches and the final pieces engaged me more than others, just as various works always do.



Only took one and a half hours to hang...

After much messing about trying to pack out the fixings so that the boards would hang as well as possible, I got the pieces hung last Saturday. Here I have to acknowledge the help of my partner, Nick, who produced endless amounts of different packer materials from goodness knows where, and who levelled the four pieces on the wall. Bring on Friday!