I was scrolling through images upon images, of the same sort of art that i have been looking at for weeks. I couldn’t help but feel that I had became trapped, in an endless cycle of books and letters page after page after page. i’m a strong believer of the saying;
“always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got.” I cant help but feel that the lack of new and interesting ideas for the degree show kinda proves my point. I decided that I needed a brake a new injection of inspiration. like all good ideas I needed to switch it up a gear and try find a new layer to my work. I felt the need to be playful, and with the sun being out I felt like today was a good day. yes, today was going to be the day I worked out what I needed. I decided to close the book, the tab and the thought of looking at another Painting from Fiona Banne, ( not that i have anything against her work, I just needed a new force of visual imagery, to gorge on) I decided that I was going to turn my hand to painting again. but I was just going to jump in. I was in the mood for some abstract painting I felt like all my mind was clogged up. with words. I felt like the cold crisp white background of my work that I have been making over the last few weeks was as boring for me to look at as the books that I had been using to pull my inspiration.
I can’t help but feel that my work had hit a wall, like a concrete text of jargon that you have to break down and work out before you can get yourself out of a phone contract.
thinking about my work I would say that my relationship with words is abstract in the sense that I don’t see them the same way as other people do. this moment, this single thought is what gave me a moment of clarity. it was the background of my work that I felt myself being pulled down by. I remembered a conversation with Robin, about one of my canvases, it was a single white letter “s” on a red and blue background. He said that he thought it was one of my strongest paintings.
I decided to revisit the background of my work. It is such an important part of any image one that I have simply overlooked in my work. I decided to look at the colour wheel as a starting point for these new paintings, I opened my paint box and rummaged through limiting myself to 4-5 colours I would then break down why I chose these colours and work out what it was that I was drawn to. ( there will be a separate blog post about this coming soon) once i had worked this out I would then begin to paint and let my emotions be free.
My new paintings went from bright base coats like Orange and yellow to black. the steps I made in this process was very erratic, I was more getting carried away with covering the canvas in one matt colour before adding any other colour from my pallet. The canvas had to be completely covered the brush strokes went in one direction. I would then spin the canvas around and push the paint again in the opposite direction so the brush strokes would change. This was done one every canvas almost like a religious ritual before I deemed the canvas worthy. As ridiculous as that sounds it was rather relaxing and I felt my confusion and frustration leave me after every stroke. I would then start to add colour to the canvas and feel that the new injection of colour was like a happy uplifting buzz filling my mind with a sense of wonder. I feel that from doing this my work has taken a step in a new direction and I will be interested in seeing where this takes me. even if the use of colour is short lived I do believe it will help full my mind with the new thoughts and questions that I need.
These photos are of the work when I started the process.
