MA Weeks 58 & 59 - Painting techniques and too many ideas

Reflection on the past two weeks, 4^th March 2017

A retrospective blogpost to fill in a few of the blanks.

Painting tutorial

Sharon had arranged for me to discuss my MMU paintings with another tutor called April, who is a painter. This was a very interesting meeting and I learnt a lot of information from her.

She asked a lot of quite searching questions about the work. What does the painting represent? Why is there text in it? What are these part-hidden objects? I was able to justify most of what I’d done, but it raised lots of other interesting ideas, such as the meaning of colour in maps, ghost signs in cities, thoughts about street furniture, traces of the past. There are ideas here that extend what I’d intended and could still be of use in future. An invitation to think even more deeply about my subject matter.

April works in oils and she suggested this to me as an alternative to acrylic. I’d steered clear of oils because of the drying time, but she commented that thin glazes on canvas in a warm room will dry overnight. Oil can also be used on top of acrylic to increase colour depth. I’ve since spoken to a fellow student on the BA Fine Art course who’s confirmed that oils are the way to go if you want good depth of colour.

Regarding colour, April suggested that the tube-consistency colours are too raw and intense. I’d already seen this myself and it was a relief to a certain extent when she confirmed it. She suggested mixing colours to take the edge of them, and also mixing your own grey as a neutral to work other colours off. Regarding the white of the road, she felt it was too sharp and that I could either overpaint it or underpaint it. This would mean it would still be there as a trace, and would be less white!

Further suggestions were to work on small pieces as a series, each an experiment, perhaps with a limited palette and a limited timescale. Finally, April suggested a book by David Hornung, “Colour: a workshop for artists and designers”, to learn more about how colours work together.

This was a useful meeting for me. There were a few wake up calls and also a few nudges our of my comfort zone. In the end, I haven’t had time to take forward any of April’s suggestions, but this may be possible after the MA. I am grateful to April for her time.

 

Meeting friends

At the end of the month, I had a couple of lunchtime meetings. I caught up with Michelle, whom I hadn’t seen for ages, and we vowed to go on a walk together – which we did, and it was very successful, giving rise to a lot of visual outcomes. At the walk, I invited Michelle to “see the familiar anew”, according to Tina Richardson’s advice, and I also met up with Tina. She is one of my psychogeography gurus (the other, of course, being Zoë Tew-Thompson) and is witty, interesting company!

Doing too much

As I mention in this March blogpost , things got a bit fraught towards the end of February and beginning of March. The physical undertaking of getting to Manchester when I wasn’t well and the deluge of information the conference and subsequent feedback generated (not to mention all the ideas I got from meeting up with Michelle and Tina!) overwhelmed me and I ended up being ill. One upshot of this was that my excellent peer group pointed out to me that I can’t do everything – yes, I did need the bleeding obvious stating to me at that point – and made some really helpful suggestions about managing my practice and visual output. These have stayed with me and helped me as I’ve continued with the MA.