Artist in Residence at The John Henry Newman School

I'm feeling quite happy about the direction that my work is going in at the moment. I took a bold move earlier in the month and put some shapes onto the canvas, circles, squares and torn paper shapes – in florescent red paint. The idea behind this? Well, I wanted to spice the dynamics of the painting up, to add something almost alien to the piece, and kind of unexpected. It kind of acts as a visual boundary, and also as a distraction. When trying to concentrate on a small area of the painting, you are distracted by the bright colour, and that acts nicely as a boundary and I think, at the moment, that it works with my ideas. Using shapes work in contrast to the rest of the free mark making too, I like it at the moment, but I need to be careful not to go too far. I think that I can easily go in the wrong direction here. I've been looking at 'Bad Paintings' too, I think that's where the bright colours came from.

I've also been working behind the stretcher, with canvas basically stretched the wrong way around, and then with a layer of translucent fabric stretched correctly. I've been making holes to expose the layer underneath, which adds quite a bit of depth to my work. I think I like this. I'm working on a big version right now to see if it works on a large scale.

I got some nice fabric the other day, and I look forward to using that later this week, I plan to make up some more translucent pieces different framework. I’ve also been adding wooden ‘bars’ over the top of some smaller canvases, and to my surprise, it looks like it might look ok.

It's been a whole month since my last post, longer than I had planned. I actually went through one of those phases that we all get, thinking that your work is going nowhere and that all your ideas have gone stale, feeling that I was repeating myself and struggling for motivation. That probably makes it sound worse than it was. I do believe that those phases are important though, and have told myself that alot over the last few weeks.

During the schools half term break, I stayed away from the studio, in the hope that I would return with fresh eyes. I also went to the Freize art fair, which was tiring but worthwile. I was sure that I'd overdosed on art that weekend and drained me over the next week, hence the struggling phase I guess. The last couple of weeks have been good though. I've continued to push my ideas forward and have been adding bright colours to my work as a kind of visual boundary/distraction. It kind of works and looks odd at the same time, I like it and don't like it at the same time. I've been using paper and making rubbings and cutting holes in the canvas too, exposing layers underneath. I think my work is looking exciting again which is good and a relief. I think some of the 'ripping up work' tasks that I've been doing in the class room is having a positive influence on my work too.