I’ve been going in 2 directions this week. I’ve been eager to put oil paint on a big canvas and get the oil paint smell going again. This has come about mainly due to me pulling out a canvas from about a year ago and just having a look at it. It looks better now than how I remembered it. It looks raw and almost effortless, I like the rushed look, although it certainly wasn’t rushed, there is lots of bare canvas, some charcoal marks, something that could be figurative, it’s unfinished quality. After playing about for some weeks with cardboard, I decided to build a cardboard model of a part of the painting. The drawings of the fallen box seemed to do something for me, so I wanted to explore this route a little further. I then made up a large canvas, the size of the old painting and started work, working from the cardboard model and what was left of that fallen box from the other week and the resulting drawings. So I’m making a painting of a 3D model of a painting. A different starting point, but what does it all mean?
So the see-through paintings, or rather the ink on plastic pieces, these remain ongoing. I like that they are small and can easily be picked up and moved around. I was writing in my sketchbook some ideas about what these pieces of work are about. I made some interesting discoveries during this process of looking and writing. I was thinking about disguise, maybe that one layer is trying to disguise itself by using another layer, and this thought led me to the idea of cealing oneself. The thing is the layers are transparent or translucent, so it’s not a great place to hide. I then re-wrote the old notion of trying to look closely to see beneathe the surface to see what is really going on, which led me to think about false identities, different realalities. I’ll be continually thinking about this, and will probably find it hard to sleep as it’s been on my mind constantly, which actually might be a good thing.
I still feel as if I’m in a bit of a late September slump, but I’ve been getting on with it. I decided it was time for a big studio clear up, as you can see from the pictures, it was a bit untidy, so clearing my space will help clear my mind a bit.
I continued to work small scale, playing with the clear film in the place of canvas around a stretcher frame. I found out that indian ink and acrylic ink is the stuff to use, it gives all kinds of nice translucencies, and washes, some brush marks show up, and sometimes it’s all blurred.
You can put a load of acrylic paint on, let it dry and peel it off, and use masking tape to take layers off. There seems to be lots of scope. But I keep looking longingly at my bundle of canvas and some big stretchers, so I may scale back up and revert to canvas/hessian for a few days and try scaling up with the clear film too. And I need to get cracking with my walk-in-able painting too now I have some clear space.
I’ll be heading into London in a few days for some much needed inspiration, hopefully that will end my slump for a while.
Last week was an annoying week. I hit one of those dry spells and wasn’t feeling it with anything I was producing. I made some large drawings of the fallen box, but I found it hard to get into the work making process all week, so I felt frutrated all week and into the weekend. Looking back now though, I quite these large drawings, so i’ll continue to make them.
On Friday, it was suggested that I try using this window film, the kind you use to insulate windows and make them like doub;e glazing, I didn’t know such a thing existed, thanks Laura. I found out that Homebase sold such a thing, and bought some. It comes as quite a large sheet, about 5ft x 8ft. I tested some out on an old stretcher and used the ‘special tape’ that came with it and then used a hairdryer, and as the instructions described ‘magic’ happened (it tightened up nice and strong). It looks good, totally transparent, and tough enough to work on. I got stuck right in with some oil paints and pigments, and scratched into the surface with sandpaper. The surface did go wrinkly, but the hairdrier sorted it out. I’ll be trying out some acrylics on this surface today, and working on 2 layers again, in black and white.
So, so far I’ve experimented with the following: Voile – translucent and nice to work with, nice substitute for canvas. Polythene sheet – translucent but not as seethrough as I’d hoped, stretches well, but you can’t get the folds out. Cellothane – transparent, doesn’t like being stretched, nice for a using on it’s own though, it will tear really easily. Window film – transparent, stretches really well, suprisingly tough, tightens with heat. So I’ve found my new material. Maybe.
I’ve been building some little things out of cardboard and cellophane and painting on them, they are just small models at the moment to see how they sit with my ideas. One of them is made from 4 small frames that have some cellophane attached and that have been painted on. I kind of like it and I’d like to build a full size one, so that it is a painting that you can walk into and move around in.
I later moved onto a larger model, using polythene instead of the cellophane, it isn’t as transparent, a bit more ghosty. It was hanging from my ceiling with some tape, looking rather fragile and sorry and I thought it was a bit of a joke and just left it and went home. Today the structure was found fallen, half over a small stool and half on the floor, all deformed and broken. I’ve started 2 big drawings of it/from it. It is far more interesting now having fallen. It looks like a sorry sight. Maybe I will make a series of drawings of the structure as it is rehung and brought back to life.
I’ve just been keeping up the making of work this week, I’ve been fairly productive and have been flirting with colour, and then running away back to the safety of black and white. I began to add single blocks of colour to my work as a distraction and something unexpected, which has backfired as I seem to do it too often now. I feel as if I need a reason to use colour, and ‘because I feel like it’ isn’t a reason.
Double layered canvases, made using polythene instead of canvas has been the order of the day today. It has a skin like texture and and stretches nicely around the frame. Hitting it with a stick will pierce it though. drying paint can be scratched away revealing what was underneath. I painted a torn piece of paper that looks as if it has come apart, as you move around the ‘canvas’ the rectangle breaks apart and comes together. I’m not sure about the blue though.
I have written some thoughts about it in my sketchbook, I’ll share them here:
movement, 3d (fake), breaking, moving apart, coming together, connecting, disconnecting, the tearing of something uniform, recognisable shape being deconstructed/fragmented, a grounding, negative mark, something safe being broken.
My sketchbooks these days are all just a collection of words and scribbles jotted down as I paint.
If you want to see the painting working in a movement kind of way (does that make sense?) I’ve got a quick video clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBqB4MJXa8
