Reflection
Now seems like a good time to look back over what I have done so far and where I see my work heading in the lead up to our degree show.
Before Christmas my work was very different to what I’m doing now, but like I said in my earlier posts I really wasn’t enjoying what I was doing and that is why I changed my focus onto my current project.
Once I had got my dissertation handed in I could really focus on my practice and develop my current idea. What I wanted to do was create paintings that had a real atmospheric feel to them. Whether it was how I started painting with more dramatic stormy seascapes, or some of my more recent smaller paintings, which put across a calmer more relaxed view. With this project I wanted to work more from memory rather than working directly from an image. I think this aspect helps me to keep the sense of abstraction in my paintings. What I did not want was a typical seascape depicting a sky, a sea, a sun set and boats in the horizon, which really wasn’t the look I was going for. A lot of the work I have done so far is experimenting to see how different ideas would look. As this was a subject matter that I have never looked at before within my practice I was not really sure how different ideas would turn out, I feel like a lot of the works I have created even while experimenting have gone pretty well. However as lots of what I was doing was experimenting, some things didn’t turn out as well, like colour choices or the composition choices. But that’s fine, that’s the whole reason why I tried these things out first in my sketch book and on paper. Anyway, I am pretty pleased with what I’ve been creating so far and I’m glad I did change my project as I’m really enjoying painting again.
So, in the next couple of months leading up to the degree show what is it that I want to do? Well, I really want to work on a big scale canvas again, kind of around the size I am working on at the minute, which is roughly 6 x 4ft. I think working on a big scale really helps put across the sense of atmosphere to the viewer. As well as this I’d like to try framing some of the small paintings I did on paper, like the two small paintings I put in for our auction as I really liked how these looked. Even though they aren’t big dramatic and atmospheric paintings, personally I find them really calming to look at and that is the atmosphere I am creating with these paintings, a calm and tranquil feel.
When I think about the degree show and what I want to put in I am not 100% sure exactly what I will have up as I am still making work, although I think a big painting much like the size I am working on now would look really good, or maybe even two paintings alongside each other, slightly smaller than the 6 x 4ft canvas I’m using now but still quite big. Then I can have my sketch book, smaller canvases and smaller framed paintings as supporting works.
