University Campus Suffolk

Here is a painted version of another of the rooms at Eltham Palace.

I applied large areas of smooth paint to flatten the perspective and make the space appear indinstinct and unreal.

Again I used colours similar to those in Weischer’s Untitled, to add a contemporary atmosphere to the old-fashioned interior.

I also applied the paint thinly in some areas, to make it appear as if parts of the interior were fading away.

The black, inky shadows were designed to add an extra appearance of strangeness to the interior, and were partly inspired by the heavy shadows that often appear in the paintings of Francis Bacon. These black shadows often sit beside insubstantial figures, reversing the amount of emphasis and strength normally given to reprsentations of figures in relation to shadows.

This gives the images a disturbed sense of normality, in giving these over-emphasised shadows a presence similar to that of a figure. This is an effect which I also attempted to create in my picture, making the over-dark shadows appear almost alive against the sometimes fading colours of the interior.

Entrance Hall, Eltham Palace- December 2012-January 2013 – This drawing was done as a practice at getting the feel for the detail and proportions of the rest of the entrance hall at Eltham Palace, in preparation for choosing another area of it to paint.

I wanted to draw it in great detail so it would be easy for me to retain the tonal values and light and dark areas when translating it into a painting.

I also wanted to record the fine detail so that I would have more to choose from when selecting the details that I wanted to include in the painting.

Next I chose the area that I wanted to translate into a painting. I began with the background, which I wanted to depict in a vague, abstract way so that the furniture appeared somewhat disembodied from the surroundings.

I also used brighter colours for this painting, for a more contemporary feeling, and was particularly inspired by the bold blues and pinks in Weischer’s Untitled (2001).

I completed this painting extremely quickly, in little over an hour, and think that it would be interesting to recreate it on a larger scale and in more detail for more impact.

For this interior I continued the idea of painting brightly-coloured objects on a black background, but temporarily departed from the theme of contemporary interiors to use some period elements, such as the georgian window. I did this as I thought that these objects would add an atmosphere that went well with the dark background.

I also had a very clear idea of the colours I wanted to use, so added the flowers to go with the purple and green of the rocking chair.

i use this chair recurringly because it allows me a lot of scope for distortion, and the vertical pieces of wood at its back allow me to create a ‘dissolving’ appearance, by painting some of them as if they are incomplete. I also think that this striking effect creates a strong sense of unreality.

For this painting I again used a mixture of acrylics and waterbased oils. I found the waterbased oils produced a particularly interesting effect when painting the tablecloth. I intitially used them to create softly-blended tone in the fabric, but as I attempted to perfect the light and dark areas the paint became ever thicker and the white paint that I added to lighten areas began to blend with the blue underneath. To solve this problem, I tried scraping away the recent layers of paint, and in doing so found that this gave that area of the tablecloth a translucent effect, so decided to leave it as it was.

For the light around the lamp I used dry paint and a splayed brush for an appearance of glistening, scattered light.

Once again I tried to make the objects in the composition appear detatched from their surroundings and each other, in order to create an unreal quality within the image.

Next time I would try a more simplified, pre-planned composition as I think that this time I added too many different components so that they detract from each other and from the composition’s impact.

For this painting I decided to use a black background to create a dreamlike and disjointed appearance. I wanted the objects in the room to appear unanchored, seeming to float in the space, separate from the surrounding walls and floor.

I also wanted the background to have a tonal, slightly scratched appearance, and to acheive this I first painted the card black, before adding dry white paint with a rough brush for a slightly textured appearance.

I wanted to create a confusing sense of pespective within the space, and so added corners to the walls in a unrealistic places, for example adding a protruding angle in the centre where the two rooms would normally be separated by a parallel wall.

I also decided to make the space abstract and ambiguous with my use of bold white lines indicating the edges of the walls. This style was inspired by the bold linear, and often cagelike structures frequently featured in the works of Francis Bacon, which I studied for my dissertaton. The idea of these structures is that they flatten pictorial space, making it confusing and threatening.

This was also my aim for this picture; hence its title.

I used the same chairs for this composition as I included in Crooked Chairs, as I thought they had a striking appearance, in particular the rocking chair in the foreground. I used waterbased oils for the chairs to give them a more fluid appearance, using bold colours to make them contrast from and appear to glow alluringly yet ominously against the dark background.

The lampshade was added from an image found on the internet, as unfortunately I had no available suitable lamps to refer to. My original idea was to add a very contemporary lampshade to go with the painting’s futuristic appearance, but when i found this ‘shirt lamp’ on the internet i loved its strange, ‘melting’ appearance of decay, thinking that it went very well with my theme of unreality, and had to add it to my composition.

I would like to expand Maze further into a panoramic picture, making the composition more complex and adding more interior elements, such as an incomplete staircase.

Here is my latest version of Eltham Palace bedroom. For this one I experimented with adding bright red to the black and white colour composition. Although it didn’t quite produce the desired eerie effect, it did give the image a more dramatic appearance.

For this piece I used a mixture of pencil, fineliner, drawing inks and acrylics, to enable the interior to include both fine detail and bold tonal elements.

My next steps for developing this image will be to recreate it using different colours and to varying degrees of abstraction, to decide which levels of abstraction and representation create the strongest sense of unreality before presenting it on a large scale.