Painting to Some Purpose

This may be just a post for the sake of it, but I felt the need to put some thoughts down somewhere for consideration later. The last couple of weeks have seemed pretty good in terms of better understanding my work and where I’m going. I have had some quality conversations that were much needed.

I’ve been working on a big mindmap thing that is pinned to the studio wall, charting the journey of me and my work, it’s been a useful task and everything seems to link up and cross over. It has also allowed me to spot some suprising things that you don’t realise when you just get on with making work. This, along with some critiques with a few other artists recently and catching up with some friends from my BA have made feel a bit better/confident with my work.

Trying to get my head around the bigger picture is something that I’m pushing myself towards at the moment, and trying to put my work into context. Can/should my work have a social concern or a psychological imapact? The use of materials is important in my current work, so maybe that is where my answers lie. This has led me back to thinking about my old dissertation, which has given me the drive to do further research into philosophy and postmodernism and the like. The big question that I’m trying to get my head around at the moment is ‘what does it mean to make abstract art today?’

In the meantime, I’ll be attempting to ground my work in some sort of reality, by taking real objects and abstracting them. This should freshen things up.

I now have 5 large paintings on the go. I am trying to understand them, trying to figure out why I put certain things here and there. I’m becoming less and less interested in mark-making, and certainly don’t want to slip into the old scribbling to be expressive mindset as I don’t think that will benefit me at the moment. Everything is staying quite controlled, although it doesn’t always look like it. I’ve mentioned before that my friend has said that my work has become colder and more devoid of emotion than it once was, and I was kind of trying to get my work away from that, but as I decided with my last post, that I am to let my work lead me, then devoid of emotion and cold is fine if that’s where my work wants to take me.

I’ve been thinking about repitition, shapes, fragmentation of these shapes. Everything that I’m doing is informing the next thing that I do. I’m also constantly thinking about existence and different realities/dimensions, I think that is due to me working in with different layers. Birth and death and then the possibilities of rebirth are on my mind whilst I’m going about my business too, that was something that I was thinking about when I was a student.