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.
