I’ve been moving between 4 pieces of work over the last couple of weeks. I’m eager to get these done so I can move onto something else. I don’t want to start another peice of new work and leave these unresolved. I understand my work a lot better now, so I feel better about my studio practice as a result. I was going at too fast a pace for a while and trying to do everything without taking time to analyse what I’ve been making. Going a bit slower sometimes helps, as does taking a step back.
I’ve ended up with maybe 3 or 4 pieces that I’m happy with through this process of thinking and researching that I’ve been going through since February, and feel that my work has jumped on a little bit. I’m quite looking forward to a future post that I’ll make where I’ll look through my work over a period of a year and see what has happened.
I’ve continued to explore my idea of lines/grids/cages/structures over the last week or so. This has interestingly led me back to looking at Mondrian, who a vaguely remember writing about when doing my dissertation. So I’ve found myself yet again re-visiting past ideas and interests. The thing I’m interested in are the lines and grids within Mondrian’s work and the conflict between conformity and individuality, a sense of struggle to keep a sense of spirituality in a fast moving world. I like this feeling of conflict.
I used photoshop the other day to play around with the some ideas, and then ended up actually doing it for real on the canvas as it seemed to work. I find this a fun way to work, and it’s useful too. A few days later I started doing stuff to another canvas, and thought to myself, “doh, I should’ve done this in photoshop, I’d have been able to undo it.” Never mind.
It feels like Spring today, and that always makes it easier for me to work for some reason. I always seem to be more productive during the Spring and the Summer. My aims for the next few days is to sort out my use of borders and layers in my work, to further look into my use of layering. I did some work last week, one looking like a grid, and one more like a collapsing grid. They didn’t seen related to each other until I looked at photos of them both on one sheet of paper. They use completely different techniques and materials but there is some relationship going on between the two of them. Something quite ordered and starting to crumble, and something complely falling to pieces. Both remind me of a broken cage or a skeleton/rib cage.
I managed to get to a couple of exhibitions over the last week. Danny Rolph at the Poppy Sebire gallery was good, I’ve been wanting to see those layered triplewall paintings for a while, and it was worth the visit. I also got to see Arshile Gorky at the Tate Modern, which was ace, especially seeing the development of the work through his career.
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.
