It's been a week since my last post, and although I still have a few days until the residency begins, I thought it was about time for another update.
I updated my website the other day, and I mentioned on there what my initial plans regarding my work would be. I mentioned that over the last few months, I've become increasingly interested in extending the pictorial space of his paintings. This includes the support and what is behind the 'canvas' as well as extending the work out into the space as a 3D object. I plan to use this idea as the starting point next week, but why do I want to go in this direction? Before I try to answer that question for myself, there is something else that has been bugging me about my work this summer.
I've often referred to my work as drawing with paint, or even just drawing with charoal and pencils on the canvas, I rarely ever used a brush, so my work had a great drawn quality to it with layers of charcoal. Something changed in my work earlier this year whilst I was making a new body of work for an exhibition in Bristol, everything got a little to 'painty'. At the time I didn't really notice it, maybe due to deadlines and the fact that for me it was my 'new exciting work with colour'. It wasn't until much later, at an open studios weekend, that I saw a selection of my new work and my old work next to each other. It was clear to me that my new work was lacking in that certain something that my older, more drawing like work had, and that moment was definately a bit of an eye opener for me. Some of my fellow artists from the studio also pointed out how interesting my previous work was. So that was it, I knew I needed to get back that raw quality that previously existed. I guess it's one of those things that happens from time to time, you just get too involved with a way of working and forget to step back and properly evaluate what you are doing. It is my hope that this blog will help me to do that. At college of course, you'd have your tutors there to advise you, but outside of that environment, you have to keep your wits about you. I think it is an important process to go through as an artist.
So as well as the idea of extending the pictorial space of paintings, I will also try to recapture the excitement of my work from a couple of years ago. As for that question that I asked myself at the beginning of this post, I'll come back to that in my next post.
