In my last post, I planned to work on some small canvases all around the theme of boundaries. I spent most of last week making and thinking about these small pieces. They aren’t pieces of work as such, more of a result of what was going on in my head at the time. One of the small canvases had it’s mark, or part of it’s pictorial space extended onto the studio wall. I’ve seen it done before, but I just found that it was something that I wanted and maybe needed to do. This got me thinking about breaking the boundaries of the canvas. I also used colour as a boundary and used big areas of black and white, but they weren’t really happening the way I had imagined.
I had some fun projecting both my see-through paintings and the caerdboard models (based on sections of my paintings) onto the studio wall. The work on the transparent film worked nicely for a first try, lots of subtle marks were projected into the space and it certainly gave my work a completely different feel. The cardboard wasn’t as succesful due to the more definate shadows. I guess the next aim would be to try to cut out a surface, in a way that shows the sponteneity of my marks, and try lighting that.
The week ended with me making a double layered plastic film box stretcher thing with a ‘sheet’ of screwed and folded up acrylic paint inbetween. I asked myself what the boundary was, the acrylic sheet? The plastic film? It has got me thinking more about space. The acrylic paint sheet was made by painting onto a surface the size of the stretcher, it was then folded and jammed into a space it’s own size, but took up only a part of that space. The paint is trapped between the surfaces that it was meant to be painted onto. So I guess the plastic sheets are trapping the paint and are therefore the boundary here.
Looking through my sketchbook this morning at some notes I made on the train on the weekend, I came across something that I had written that has got me thinking, Am I killing my own work by trying to move it forward?
