Today, our lecturers Jane Watt and Susan Barnet prepared a workshop called drawing as a way of thinking, where we created drawings according to our practice/ideas etc.
I enjoyed the process and realised how messy my mind could be, but the mess also ends up in something beautiful, like my drawing today that I really enjoy looking at.
At first, I started with a few squares and one text explaining my idea for the cube exhibition, and as you can see in my early posts on this blog, I previously created a little mind map like this one but It was not as big as this one. I was actually told to go even bigger if I thought that my thoughts would go even further than this.
In addition to the whole workshop, I wrote some notes on some artists that were mentioned in the presentation. The one artist that got my biggest attention was Matthew Ritchie, and I believe that he caught everyone’s attention with his exhibition called Demon in The Diagram.
What caught my attention was his idea of making the visitors parts of the exhibition. In my notes, all of my first reactions are noted as I note down everything that leaves an impression on me/ I know I need it because it closely connects to my practice.
After playing with my projection and a tutorial at uni, I realised that I could project my work on other surfaces than just leaving it as it is. I got inspired by the work of Jane Watt and her WASH YOUR HANDS projection, where she projected her own hands being washed on top of a sink.
That was the reason for me to project a projection of my face on top of my face.
I realised that I am reffering to her work in mine. The idea was to project it the same, but I did not realise that I moved the projector a little, which now made an interesting video with the mouth travelling around my face.
In order to have a nice looking video/ a video that I can manipulate with, I had to use of the Adobe programs. I switched between Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects (AE because I was silly and thought that PP was the wrong program, but I still learned something, which was unnecessary, but…yeah).
In Premiere Pro, after almost destroying my laptop with anger that nothing is working and everything is too slow, I created a 25 minute video of me changing 25 emotions.
The effects that I used for my video was: cropping, adding grain/noise, changing brightness, sharpening and colour correction. I colour corrected the picture from warm colours to cold colours as seen underneath here:
The reason for cropping of the picture was mostly because in this video, I didnt want my eyes to be seen and I accidentaly moved lower than I wanted and only one of my eyes was in the frame(looking creepy and weird).
I am currently working out some issues on my laptop, downloading some supporting program from my video player, but once I get it working, I will upload the video on my youtube/vimeo account and put the link here. I like updating my posts, so I will be probably updating this one.
In the past days, I tried another way of working. Meaning using different props/colour.In these pictures below, I used LED lights to put a different mood to the photographs, purple shampoo to make the water purple and a canvas. The idea of using a canvas came to my head when I thought about making the surroundings ‘soft’. But in the end, it made the whole photo look staged-like, which is not what I want. I thought about it, because I really enjoy these pictures and like my expressions in them, but I want my work to be all about the domestic space. Making it a little bit closer to the viewer/audience.
The other ones, without the canvas have a sense of vulnerability, making it look like the pictures were taken in unpredictable moments of someone’s suffering.
DISCLAIMER: In the photos, my mental health is not at risk, my aim is to portray emotions and situations connecting to my idea/project. In these pictures, I am just simply making a use of my acting background.
Today, after many hours of work, I finally finished my painting. The title is still unknown as I am still unsure if I want each of the works to have their own title or a title all together.
I was asked this question by one of my lecturers last year with my series of paintings. I decided to give each a title but at this moment, I can’t remember any of those titles, so I think even for myself, giving one title to everything would be more memorable, but I will see.
The materials used for this painting was Oil paint mixed with Sansodor, both from a brand of Winsor & Newton.
