One bad week followed by one great week. That’s the way it wants to be, but luckily enough that’s how it’s been.
Thanks for the comments David, Carolyn. Carolyn, Photoshop has been an invaluable slave, assisting me in planning and preparing what the whole piece is going to look like. That’s how I’m pretty clear in my mind what the end result is going to look like and why I’m so excited. Trying to convey this to my tutor on the other hand took some work, some printouts of my planning pieces etc. I’m pretty confident he gets it now as when it came to allocating degree show spaces I got the space I wanted as a result of my proposal submission, so all’s good there :O)
Interestingly we’re into Easter holidays now, the college is open as usual apart from the bank holidays, so getting access to the studios is easy, and amazingly there’s almost as many of us in now as there is in term time. All working on our degree show pieces, so a good encouraging atmosphere. Funny how it makes us start to realise that with only 7 weeks prep left, 5 now actually, that soon we’ll be without studio space. We’ll have to source our own spaces; we’ll all disperse and go our separate ways, quite sad really. We forget how lucky we are having space in the centre of London like this, and I’m only relieved I’ve been making full use of it, yet it also highlights more what I’ll be missing when its gone.
I keep getting asked why I’m painting on coloured squares. Fair question I guess. It all stemmed from an initial conversation with my tutor over the tone of my palette being very warm and that maybe I should consider using ‘cool’ grounds, help create more contrast. On this piece of work I couldn’t choose just one colour and thought about maybe three, but which three…. Then I got thinking about Chuck Close and how all his portraits start with coloured squares, that’s when it hit me; I’d build the portraits onto a random collection of coloured squares. So there you have it.
Having painted quite a few this week, I’m now in a good position to create an image for the degree show catalogue. I did consider submitting something completely different, but have settled for an excerpt from this piece. I’ll montage together some individual images into a partial grid like the one I’ve attached to my previous blog entry, but more realistic of the final piece. What I mean by that is, include some blank canvas squares. You see there are some peers who should be part of the piece, but for whom I don’t have a photo to work from. Either they’ve joined the cohort after 1st year or they weren’t in college that day in our 1st week of 1st year when the photos were taken. For these I am including a blank coloured square. I could have photographed them, but the time has passed, and the aesthetic would be totally different so I haven’t.
