Reflection
on the past week – 23rd May 2016
Some interesting
experiences and work this week. I haven’t been back into the print room,
unfortunately, because I was ill on my afternoon off. Shame as I had written a list
of things to try out. However, I have been making some progress with some
little acrylic pieces.
I pursued the idea
of working up the repurposed pylon monoprint from my Week 26 post into four pieces. As time is of the
essence, I decided to work straight into acrylics rather than work with pastels
or cut paper as I might normally do when planning and developing a piece. I wanted to see how the colours and
paint would work.
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| Pylon 1 : spot the constructivist influence |
This is one of the
results at the first sketch stage. There are two or three layers of paint and
I’ve used some masking tape too. It’s fairly faithful to the original monoprint
but it’s clear that there is too much going on at the top left and not so much
at the bottom right. I’m therefore working on a second sketch which is looking
much more balanced and which I hope will be OK to reproduce on board for the
End of Year show.
It’s interesting
how the marks translate, or not. The “grubby” marks of the monoprint, which
give a nice industrial feel, don’t work so well in the acrylic. The inclusion
of marks of different thicknesses in the acrylic version gives the work energy
and movement. Not that they lack in the original; I have just had to think
differently about how to represent them and how to rework the lines of the
original to get the piece more balanced.
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| Crit in transit |
The original four
sketches were the subject of a three-phase crit at the end of last week! I put
a couple of them onto whatsapp and there were suggestions they would work up as
linocuts – I’m not overly experienced in linocutting but I might give that a go
later on in the year. Then I had a crit with two classmates on our way to
Salford (of which more later), now known as the “crit in transit”. This
revealed some ideas of day and night, of lights beaming out of the darkness,
and a very challenging question of whether this represents what’s going on in
my head (who knows?). Later, when I finally got to Salford, another two
classmates kindly had a look. There were further suggestions of taking the
pieces back into print, perhaps by monoprinting from or into them, of further
layering, and also the question of trying to get them up off the page more.
They do look 2D, but perhaps that’s how they’re supposed to look. I’m not going
to be able to try all these things before the end of year show, but I am definitely
up for trying a bit more layering and I’ll do that when I go back to working on
them tomorrow.
The Salford jaunt
was interesting. We met with MA students from Manchester Metropolitan
University and the University of Salford in a place called Atelier Artworks, an
old light bulb factory. It was a strange space; industrial, dirty, under-used,
disused almost, yet alive with the studios of a number of artists. Because of
being ill I hadn’t really had much chance to prepare, so my responses were very
much that – immediate.
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| Salford Piece 1 |
I concentrated on
shapes and colour and produced two compressed charcoal and pastel pieces. On
both the bottom layer was a rubbing of the metal stairs. There was a lot of
improvement that I could immediately see; if I’d thought a bit more about it
beforehand, I would have positioned my various images on piece 1 differently.
As it was they overlapped too much. A lesson to learn. Don’t get overwhelmed by
the situation and jump straight in. On piece 2 I think the red is a bit too
intense. I liked the colour of the two doors, bright red and bright emerald
green (these were their colours in real life), but I wish I’d left it as a
black pencil drawing on the red rubbing.
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| Salford Piece 2 |
On the other hand,
producing these as immediate responses means there is a lot to develop – there
are no filtered or refined ideas in there. The shapes and colours can be used
in different ways in future pieces. I really wish I’d taken more photographs
and made more rubbings of the stairs to use now I’ve got back. Another lesson to
learn. Part of the immediate response also means that these pieces bear the
imprint of the site; not only the stair-rubbings, but the fact that I sat on
the uneven, cracked concrete floor to do them. This means the lines are not
straight because the floor was so uneven; something that I couldn’t filter out
as I actually did the work. I am
beginning to understand, and to like, a little bit more about responding to
place through these experiences (the Armley walk, the pylon photos, the Salford
Symposium).
We had a crit in
groups of three and one of the comments on piece 2 was that it was like looking
through a window when there was a dangerous chemical incident going on. It made
me see the piece in a different way and I liked it a bit more then. I think the
first stage in developing something from this would be to take the stair
pattern from piece 1 and work with it; this was the first thing that captured
my attention as walked up to the space where we’d be working.
There wasn’t
nearly as much time as I would have liked to interact with the students from
other institutions. I think most of the others probably felt the same as I did
– slightly nervous, happier to stick with our own classmates. It would have
been nice to have had an ice-breaker to get to know people and perhaps more
time to view each other’s work. Having had the experience, I wish I could go
back and do it again and get more out of it.
