It’s been a busy few weeks. I’ve given one presentation about my work and now I have another one on the way. I’ve also started another new painting, been working on various pieces of photography work and have applied to enter the John Moores Painting Prize 2012.
This next presentation will be more challenging, as it is about my practice in general. Since my practice is quite varied and I have several different projects currently ongoing, I think I will concentrate on one aspect of my work which spans several projects, namely painting. I do not particularly see myself as a painter, but it is one of the areas of my work that I enjoy the most. When I paint I tend to think about my work and it allows me to think about other pieces I am working on, or ideas for new ones.
My paintings are made up of blocks of colour, sometimes flat 2-D colour, and other times various shades to create a more 3-D image. Neatness is a huge concern for me and I use the tiniest paintbrushes I can find to keep the edges of a block of colour as neat as possible. The paintings are usually finished off with a bold black line around the outside of an item within the picture. My pursuit of neatness also means that I practice a painting over and over again in my sketch books, until I am completely satisfied, before I even begin to think about working on my final piece. I eventually realised the potential of my sketchbooks as a piece of work in their own right. Some people say that my sketchbook work is more interesting than the finished piece and in some ways I would agree, but the sketchbook would not exist without aiming for the finished painting.
Once I have a fully practiced and perfected image I then can transfer it onto the canvas (or other desired material). I used to do this using baking parchment as tracing paper, but when I started working on bigger pieces I bought an old over head projector from ebay and I now use acetate. Each layer of the painting is copied from my sketch book onto a piece of acetate and projected, allowing me to draw around the projection. The final piece becomes a kind of paint by numbers with my sketch book to guide me.
To help illustrate my methods I have included some photographs of the various stages of creating a painting.
