On Sunday the weather was so beautiful, I decided to go painting down at Friars Meadow. Not using acrylics or oil but by collecting the mud at the fields and mixing it with water. It has been a while since I have done this and it made me realise how much I have missed it. I have enjoyed the challenge of seeing what will be created by placing materials outside and leaving it to nature but actually painting something is the thing I love. Although my main focus has been seeing the changes and markings left by nature and this has been exciting, I will now also be looking at painting with mud again. I like having my paintings be a part of the land. Mud is such a versatile material to use, and easy to manipulate on canvas.
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An artist who is well known for his mud drawings and walks is Richard Long. I wrote my dissertation on his works and processes . There was an exhibition I visited in Bristol, Time and Space, 2015, at the Arnolfini, with many of his documented walks and mud paintings, and I found these fascinating and beautiful. The photographs that showed the traces he left in the grounds and where he had moved rocks and sticks, was a way to document his actions but also were stunning to look at. He had clearly thought about the composition and so for people like my sister, who had joined me, she could appreciate the beauty in the photographs without needing to understanding the importance of his actions. I had seen many photographs of Long’s waterfall paintings but when seeing it up close you can really appreciate the large size of it and the frantic jestures he used to create the waterfall like effect, which probably couldn’t be fully appreciated on a smaller scale.
Waterfall Line, 2000, River Avon Mud on emulsion. Photograph from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/long-waterfall-line-t11970
In a previous blog post I mentioned using cyanotype as way of documenting the traces left in mud. I first attempted the cyanotype on a heavy canvas fabric but because of the thickness of it, the cyanotype did not work and ended up being either very faint and patchy or too dark.
This was slightly frustrating and I felt that this would never work but I then decided to try a thinner material, and this was much better. The patterns are much more discernible. The process of creating these cyanotype prints is a very long one, to start is the marking on the acetate of all the dents in the mud, this can take roughly two hours to fill in one, then dipping the fabric into the chemicals, drying the chemicals (this can take a day and more). The final part is placing the acetate onto the fabric in the light and waiting a couple of hours. With the finished cyanotype prints, I plan to frame them, having them in the same series, as one artwork.
A lot of my work has revolved around failure and.. hopefully success, I have never been 100% sure that what I do will workout, or can be seen as art.
An artist who embraced a look of failure in his work was Andy Warhol with his Marilyn Monroe print ‘Marilyn Diptryct’ 1962, acrylic on canvas, 2054 x 1448 x 20 mm, created after her death from a drug overdose. A multiple of the same print but in each one it differentiates, either with colour and then with fading, a look that in printmaking can be seen as a failure but this was not the case with Warhol, it was intentional, representing ‘the star’s demise’.
In 1967, Warhol did thirty silkscreen prints, another example of where he intentionally made some of the prints with imperfections, where the facial features aren’t aligned properly, with the same idea of representing her death.
My first attempt at using cyanotype has not gone to plan but it’s a learning curve as this is something I have not tried before but it is something I am going to keep trying and getting better as the last attempt came out better.
Week one is now over and there are already changes to the copper I left outside and this is even more evident when moving the plant pots and under the copper is as new.
I have now moved the pots so hopefully next week when I do this again, there would have been more marks caused by the exposure to the oxygen.
When moving the pots, the copper did curl over but as it’s the exposure the air that causes the brownish colour, this shouldn’t change much.
I have finally placed more copper outside, four pieces. I have placed plant pots over the top to hold them down again, although the copper is thicker than the last lot so I am expecting a different outcome. With the last lot of copper the wind crumpled it and created lines and patterns that I could not predict. I am not expecting this to happen this time so I plan to move the pots around the copper once a week to create some sort of interesting pattern (that was visible in the last lot of copper) from the different levels exposure to the oxygen that forms the dark brownish colour.
I am hoping to have these outside for a month but possibly more depending on how much change happens.
