Clarifying my Practice
Lately it has come to my knowledge that my overall practice is a little confusing, and after reading over my blog in it’s entirety, i think it is.
I started out my project by painting figuratively and now I am painting in an abstract style. While there is a thread, the exploration and analysis of colour, they are very different and it would be impossible for me to give each the time they need to produce work in both areas. So therefore I have decided to concentrate on one area, instead of spreading myself and my work too thin.
I have decided to concentrate on exploring colour in the abstract. I feel much more free working in this way and I think I will be able to explore colour more completely than I would in any other way.
I have lots of ideas for potential abstract works that I feel would do a better job at ‘exclusivley lexploring at colour’ rather than be applying colour to a practice (portraiture) that would take away some of the focus from my overall objective.
I’ve started by re arranging my studio space. My ‘Sierra’ painting was taking up most of my space along with artist and reference photos that I had stuck up along the wall. I took those down and have started to replace them with artists relevant to my current work. I have also removed and rolled up the canvas from my painting to give myself some extra display room for the paintings I am working on.
Continuing painting…
I think my painting is progressing well, though I think I’ve hit a bit of a dead end. I often work on a painting until everything that I think should be changed is- this isn’t, so far as it goes, a bad quality but with my paintings I need to learn to stop. I often leave them overworked and muddy and I feel that this isn’t far off. My intension with this painting is to look at colour in as many different ways as possible. But by wanting to do this I have, inadvertently, end up with a piece where the finished product doesn’t really explore colour at all. At least not to me.
I think through each stage/ layer of the painting I have done my best to and was at some stages successful. By after building the painting up layer by layer trying to achieve, explore different areas I think I have unfortunately not achieved anything- in terms of the final visual l outcome. On the positive side I have learned not to over work my painting and maybe to explore only one of two concepts at a time- Not everything on one painting!
I decided to cut this painting in half. Coincedentally the colours on each half worked better together than they did on the orignal whlole. However i am still going to piant over them both to try to develop them some more.
Exploring Colour in the Abstract
My latest painting is an extension of exploring the concept of paint pallets. I have tried to recreate the effect of various paint pallets within one painting, with the hope that this would help me explore colour in a more dynamic, unstructured way.
I often find my works becoming to static and limited to my own subconscious nuances. I thought by attempting to imitate a random action (with pallets even if the colour mixing isn’t entirely random the textures, patterns and overall composition is) it would help my painting to be more fluid and dynamic in composition and colour.
If I wanted my work to be as ‘radom and as dynamic as a paint pallete, surley I should produce a work comprised of paint pallets- or a single palette?
Yes and no. My main purpose for working like this is to explore colour to its fullest potential- and by doing this I am working in a different way than I usually would- thereby producing different coloury effects. It sounds almost counter intuitive in field where I can produce anything I want to, but to me abstract painting is very limited. It’s limited to the painter producing it.
I can’t think of things I can’t think of, and am thereby limited to my thoughts. By basing my abstract paintings on ‘something’ (something that I hope is constructive) I will achieve different results than if I didn’t. Which when wanting to explore something, is only a good thing.
Artist Reference or Not?
Lately I have been looking towards other artists for inspiration and ideas. This is something that we have all done throughout the course and something I have always struggled with, because to me it fundamentally doesn’t make sense.
I have no problem with looking at and taking inspiration from artists in an aesthetic sense. It can be very beneficial for an artist to see how another has constructed a sculpture or achieved a certain effect in a painting- in this sense it is like learning a trade by watching and imitating a carpenter or plumber for example. But to look to another artist for conceptual inspiration, is to me close-minded and futile.
Surely when making decisions like these the artist expresses what is paramount to his or herself, looking to another artist to tell you what is most important to you is like going to a restaurant and asking the chef to tell you which dish you will enjoy the most.
In my opinion the best conceptual research is curiosity, if you are curious you will find what it is you want to make art about just through living. I’m sure solely relying on artist research for conceptual context will be more deleterious to an artists practice than indulging on curiosity whether through books, television, news, internet, friends, family or just being alive. The majority of my art is based around things that I read for example, I’ve never been interested in looking to another artist to find out what he’s or she is trying to express.
However there are certain things that can be expressed in art that don’t fit into any of the categories above that are achieved by critically questioning a technique, medium or trend that is previously thought of (or overlooked) as a given. An example being Kathaina Grosse who uses painted colour to highlight the boundaries imposed on it by canvas or the like. However I imagine this didn’t come about by copying someone who already did it.
I am aware however that looking at things the way I do has an impact on my art and how I work in a way that might not have otherwise have been there. The most notable being my inability to stick to a single topic for more than a month- due to me being influenced by so many things.
I think there are lots of reasons for this some of which I have addressed in previous posts others I have not, either way I think it’s a topic for another time.
Business side of Art
I think the business side of art is something that is overlooked in most art practices. I know up until a few days a go I had given little thought to it.
However when I leave and have to start earning a living a thought about all the thing I would like to do in art and most, if not all of which require a least a little business acumen.
So this past week I have spent most of my time researching marketing, techniques that artist use for self promotion etc.
The reason I started this type of research was because of my Fine Art America website (link Below). FAA is an online platform for artist to their work- prints and originals. It is free to set up and only $30 a year for a premium membership that gets you little more but is still very reasonably priced. Long story short I set up an account and started uploading my art about a year ago. In this time I have made somewhere near $800 in print sales and have sold no paintings. This in itself isn’t remarkable and up until I started looking more into it, I thought it was the norm.
http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/1-richard-day.h…
As it turns out it isn’t the vast majority of people on FAA hadn’t sold anything in the first year and in addition to that have a lot more views on their work than I do- sometimes 10- 20x more. I say this not to brag but to highlight the conclusion I drew from this. There must be something about my work that people like- that they like enough to just spending up $250 on a print.
It’s worth pointing out that none of these people have ever met or even heard of me- with all of my sales bar one coming from America or Canada (the other from Paris). The conclusion I drew therefore was that if I could attract more people to my site I would get more sales- easy…. easier said than done.
I started out by reading Dan Turners & keys to selling art online and then The Art of Social Network marketing. Both of which were very helpful particularly The Art of Social Networking as It was more extensive than Dan Turners slide show and introduced me to things I hadn’t considered (Links below).
http://1stangel.co.uk/downloads/
http://powersfineart.com/books/
As it stands at the moment I am setting up a bi monthly mailing list, twitter Google plus and Facebook accounts exclusively for my art and writing a separate blog on the FAA website linking it more towards the work I have there. Surely now my profile with be inundated with so many views that FAA will be forced to buy new servers as their old ones will be unable to cope with the profusion of new customers falling over themselves to buy my art.
