MA Week 66 - Painting out of my comfort zone

Reflection on the past week, 24^th April 2017

 

I had the good fortune to go away for a couple of days after Easter so I didn’t get the chance to work further on ideas from last week’s mini-dérive. I did, however, go on a one-day painting course led by Julia Borodina. The day looked at using collaged elements and large areas of bold colour in landscape painting. 

The basic premise was to use big blocks of thick colour, starting by applying with a house paint brush and moving down in brush size from there. Spattering, collaged elements that hung over the side of the paper and scratching into the paint were all positively encouraged. The idea of using these big, bold colour blocks was quite alien to me, and I wasn’t alone! However, with a lot of help from Julia I managed to produce this work.

 

It’s really too colourful for me and I would like to try this technique out again with a limited palette. That way I would be more confident about the colours and could give more attention to the technique. I also wasn’t sure about the collaged elements – I didn’t think they added a great deal, apart from perhaps the crinkled paper in the “mountains”. However, other people had used this more successfully, to provide sculptural elements to their paintings. 

One thing I did really like was the scratching to reveal colours hidden underneath. This scratching technique comes in over and over again in my work. The techniques we used were something I think I’d been aspiring too, but I hadn’t quite got there. It was a really good day packed with lots of useful ideas and I expect it will provide a good starting point for future painting projects.

MA Week 65 - Mini-dérive with Michelle

Reflection on the past week, 17^th April 2017

 

Dériving in Burley

My arty friend Michelle and I had been pondering a possible collaboration and we decided to go for a wander, a mini-dérive as it turned out. We set off from the University when I broke up for Easter on Maundy Thursday, and wandered. So even though we had a definite starting point, we weren’t sure where we’d end up. 

Grate stuff

I mentioned to Michelle, Tina Richardson’s advice to “see the familiar anew” and even though we started out on the University campus, that’s what I did. Walking with someone else, who perceived the surroundings differently to me, meant that I saw things that she picked out that I would have overlooked. A good example was the many different grates and manhole covers on campus, all with their own design. I even found a grimy corner of campus that I’d never seen before, and a bit of Woodhouse Moor I’d never walked on.  

A quiet corner of campus

 

Leaving Woodhouse Moor, we drifted down towards Cardigan Road. We chatted as we drifted, commenting on the surroundings, where might we go next, what did this used to be. I also felt much less obvious and self-conscious than when wandering alone. I enjoyed being in this old part of the city, now mainly a student area, but with lots of lovely Northernness still to enjoy. My favourite part came last; the abandoned Burley Library, painted a lovely blue that was peeling back to reveal red. So many layers and shapes.

 

Burley Library, detail

Developing some ideas

Initial ideas I jotted into my phone after the walk:

• Something with the shapes and that blue from Burley Library
• Drypoint of the wander - do a sketch first of interesting shapes, views, vignettes & combine
• Shapes from grates as a "peephole" into something else? Layer up? Acetates?

The following day, I did a sketchbook page with sketches of the most interesting shapes and scenes. I’d taken over 100 photographs (!), providing a lot of interesting source material, and the issue now is how to combine these. Then I started combining these into abstract shapes. There was a tree shape that I thought would give a centrepiece for a possible abstract. I decided it would be interesting to put this as a negative space but as I drew it it using a graphite stick and putty rubber I could see that it was turning into the map from the Mabgate abstract paintings I did for the MMU conference. Pressing on, I added a coal chute and some bricks but I wasn’t sure what to do next, so left this to try something else. The coal chute is calling to me, though. 

Ideally I would have liked to be able to photocopy the sketchbook pages onto acetate, cut them up and play around with them. It being the Easter weekend, College is closed so I decided to simply draw layers of shapes on top of one another. Again,  I expected that the tree would form a kind of natural dividing line within the page I was working up, but I’m beginning to get the sense that the tree is not really what I'm looking for. What seems to work are the geometric shapes. These are mainly circles and this presents a problem. It's difficult to etch a circle. I don’t have any dividers and a quick experiment with using a compass with an etching needle in the place of the pencil didn’t work. At the moment I don't have a solution to this but I will see if I can acquire or borrow some dividers.

 

Other sketches

I did think I’d do some painting today, but I wasn’t in a painting mood so I’ve been fighting my laptop and am now on my third blogpost of the day. I’ve also been working on a sketch of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I’m trying to improve my drawing and my understanding of perspective, through action research i.e. drawing practice. I’m quite pleased with today’s effort (St Paul's 2) although it’s not perfect. I want to turn this into a mini etch at some point.











St Paul's 1

St Paul's 2











 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MA Week 64 - Catching up and Manchester

Reflection on the past week, 10^th April 2017

 

I’ve been doing quite a bit of catching up this week restarting my long overdue creative journal. I’ve done a little bit more sketching with a view to etching. I was intending to do more on last week’s collage ideas at the weekend but decided to enjoy the sunny weather instead – it might be the only two days we get!

One thing I have managed to do is to catch up with the blogposts about the Manchester Met postgraduate conference in February. The links are here:

Week 56 – developing the sketches

Weeks 57 & 58 – painting and collaging the finalised pieces, and preparing the prints

Week 58 – attending and reflecting on the conference itself

It’s been good to reflect back on this experience now I am feeling a little better. There are still a couple of posts to catch up from the end of February and I’ll get onto these as soon as possible.

 

Saul Hay Gallery

I paid a very enjoyable visit to the Saul Hay Gallery in Manchester. This is a compact gallery tucked away by the canal and railway in Castlefield. It’s not been open long but seems to be doing well, which is good news. It’s also a really friendly place and I had a good chat with the owner, Catherine. The reason for my visit was to see some work by Mandy Payne and Josie Jenkins in the “New Topographies” exhibition. I’d not seen either Mandy’s or Josie’s work for real before so this was a good opportunity on my way to meet an old friend for lunch.
 

Interior view of the gallery

 

There was a good deal of art depicting the urban within the exhibition. I keep finding that more and more people use the urban as inspiration and this gives me the will to go on with my practice. Josie is showing works from her “Scrap” series- oil paintings of a car scrapyard. It was these pieces that originally attracted me to her work. The colours are bright and the yard is depicted on a Summer day, causing a tension between the mood and subject matter of the painting, yet at the same time rejoicing in the juxtaposition of the colours. The compositions are quite tightly cropped, almost voyeuristic, which adds to the sense of tension. Josie also has a couple of pieces made from reclaimed materials . I wasn’t aware of this aspect of her practice before and found it interesting –the pieces are physically layered and this brings complexity. They are layers of landscapes within what appear to be old wooden speaker cases.

 

The white-bordered print is Mandy's work and the paintings to the left of it are Josie's Scrap series

Mandy’s pieces included a lithograph and two pieces collaged onto small tiles of her trademark concrete. I particularly liked the almost-abstract “Stripped Bare”, a lithograph and blockprint collaged onto concrete . Her work is so meticulous and detailed. All aspects – the subject matter, the limited colour palette, the substrate – conjure up the urban. I am still hoping to see one of Mandy’s aerosol on concrete pieces for real.

Inspiration, then, and also the aspiration to one day have pieces in a gallery like Saul Hay.

It was also quite interesting to “find” this part of Manchester – Castlefield – as I am no real fan of the city. However, I really liked this area, which is evidently one of the oldest areas, near the meeting point of the Bridgewater and Rochdale canals. It made me wonder if I could wander there. How would that feel? Not being in Leeds? Am I ready for that? I’m not sure.

 

MA Week 63 - Psychogeography, printing and collage

Reflection on the past week, 3^rd April 2017

 

Psychogeography

It was good to meet up once more with Zoë and Lynne to talk further about the planned walking event. It’s now scheduled for June 1st, 5-7pm. We’ll do a short walk and take some rubbings and drawings of our environment, then collage these and anything else we find back at “base”. I took along a few rubbings I’d done around the area and both Zoë and Lynne thought they were fine. I’m really looking forward to this event and I just hope it doesn’t rain! It’s such a pleasure to chat with these two people I’ve only recently met and who share some of my quirky interests! More on this when I have more details. 

Printing

As usual the print room isn’t freely available when I am, but I manged to get in on Thursday afternoon and spent most of the time printing the small copper plate from last week on various papers. At the moment the Canaletto paper seems to give the best results. I did try some Somerset paper too, but I think I left it to soak for too long and I wasn’t as happy as I’d hoped with the results.

I’m also experimenting with how much to polish the plate. I’m forming the opinion that you can polish it quite a lot more than the plastic. Then there’s the issue of the pressure on the press. I was getting quite grey whites, so to speak, but by loosening the pressure slightly I got a cleaner white. Mike put the etching blankets on for me and these really help. So really I think that to get a finished result I would have to experiment with combinations of pressure, polishing and soaking time but use the proper etching blankets.

 

Mabgate plate inked and ready to go

I also printed the Mabgate drypoint again, on Canaletto paper. Thinking back to the demo by Cath Brooke (see this week 50 blogpost ), I remembered her using a similar weight of press on these thinner plastic plates, so I gave it a go and was pleased with the result. A nice definite print, better quality than from the smaller Hawthorn press. It was only afterwards that I realised my memory was false and Cath had used a smaller press! But hey, I got a decent result, and that’s for my fab friend Larissa.

 

Collage

When I’d reflected on the crit last week, I wasn’t sure what I’d got out of it. However, I took the advice and I colour photocopied some parts of the MMU paintings onto acetate and onto paper. I then did a bit of action research, playing around with these and also with some leftover squares from the “tiles”. I did quite a lot of rearranging and overlaying but in the end I cut things up into squares… you knew this would happen… and the two images show the results I liked best. There were just some nice juxtapositions of colour and texture. I put these out on Twitter and was pleasantly surprised with the reaction. A couple of followers retweeted and I got some likes from people I’d not come across before. I took this to be an affirmation that there’s something here for further development.

 

Moans

In the past six weeks I submitted ideas for an exhibition piece and an abstract for a conference paper. I’ve heard nothing. Fine, if my submissions are not what the organisers want – not everything is going to be successful – but in these days of mailmerges and automatic replies, why can’t they have the courtesy to send a “thanks but no thanks” email? Grrr.