On my first day back in the studio after London I knew I just had to throw myself into my practical work with some experimentation.
After previously working with anaglypta wallpaper in my second year of university, I felt this to be something I could also utilize in this project. Whilst I find it incredibly interesting to work with, there is also a link between this wallpaper and my childhood.
I will always remember the awful pale yellow anaglypta wallpaper which covered the walls of the hallway at the house I grew up in. I often sat on the stairs peeling it off! This is just one of the little details, mentioned in an earlier post, that I wish to include in my art work during this project.
I, therefore, decided to begin experimenting with this material by attaching the end of a roll to the studio wall and letting it fall down onto the floor. At this point I did not have a lot of imagery from my family albums in the studio and so, for the sake of just experimenting, decided to create the figure of a woman on the paper using acrylic paint in an expressive manner.
The colours used were merely reflective of my conflicting mood at the time, angry but determined. The contrast of the red and black paint on the white paper did, however, come out a lot better than I initially expected. By watering down the acrylic and dripping it from a height onto the anaglypta, it gave the medium more freedom to flow with little control from myself.
The pattern upon the wallpaper played a large part in the overall effect of the piece, something else which I had very little control over. With the combination of the protrusion of the pattern and the thinned aspect of the paint, the drips largely found their way around the bumps which emphasized their presence.
As I reflect upon this piece I wish it had more validity in regards to subject matter. I feel I would be more positive about it if it had contained imagery from my family photos to be in keeping with my etchings, drawings and project overall. The experiment has been integral, however, in determining how I can utilise the paint and wallpaper together to create an interesting effect. I plan to mount the wallpaper onto spare canvases I have in my space and to create more expressive works but this time using imagery from my photo albums.
