Wednesday 13 April 2016

Final piece; texture, colour, landscape

Dungeness trip texture photos


      
Terry Setch - Flowers Gallery, Cork Street

http://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/view/terry-setch-reduced-to-rubble

Seeing this exhibition inspired me to take the materials I used in my work further. Setch's works are paintings of texture in which I found myself becoming absorbed by. Closely studying their surfaces and then admiring their entirety as a whole. The combination of earthiness and plastic and wax resemble a section of the ground. They are rather striking in size and each one is very dominating with their bold textures and high relief.

I really enjoyed this exhibition and wanted to use some of these methods and materials for my final piece.

       

Wednesday 6 April 2016

Polystyrene Oil Prints

This is a painting I did inspired by Astrup's 'painterly' prints. I used polystyrene and scratched marks into it, then layered on oil paint and press it onto acrylic paint. It was an interesting experiment and it worked better than I thought. It relates back to my original idea of painting using different materials. I based it on a close-up photograph I'd taken of something with a lot of texture. The way I framed it in the painting is meant to make it look like a landscape, however I think it would have been more successful without the purple round the top right hand corner. Maybe I will crop it when I stretch the canvas….
I also like the outcome of the pieces of polystyrene show below; maybe I could use them in an artwork…?

Howard Hodgkin - Time and Place
I decided to look at Howard Hodgkin because I thought his prints were relevant to the work I was doing. The book on him, 'Time and Place', says that 'we intuit the time of making individual marks, the moments of decision, the speed of execution… what we discern of its (the artwork's) evolution prompts thought about the dynamics of memory in retrieving experience'. I understood this as, we, the viewer, are able to make out the artists feelings in the painting/of the scene, by the colours, direction of brushstrokes, overlays of paint, and brush marks. Using these clues we may decide how fast the artist created the painting, which perhaps gives us an insight into their emotion at the time (impulsive? relaxed?). As explained in the book; 'complexity of the surface is a necessary condition for the representation of complex emotions'. For example my chalk pastel drawings were more impulsive, and you can tell because the marks made are fluid and continuous, whereas in the lino prints I did, the marks are rigid and restrained. It is up to the viewer what they then think of the atmosphere and emotion that lies within the landscape and the painting.
I was first drawn to look at Hodgkin because I thought his work was visually similar to mine, however after reading about his work I realised it was contextually similar as well. He uses texture to provoke deeper meaning to a scene he has painted, which compares to the way I have used texture to suggest how I feel about the familiar landscapes in my paintings. This may not be apparent to the viewer, however, the paintings are ambiguous and what the viewer might see could be different to what I see, therefore making the landscape personal to me, and also personal to them.
'The site itself had been transformed by encounters that were particular to the artist'; when you have a sense of a place that means something to you, you want to depict it in your artwork. In order for a viewer to gage what is going on, the artist must give a sympathetic response. This is why I chose to paint/print/draw the natural landscapes from memory, because I wasn't just copying what I saw, but trying to draw out some feeling that might be aroused by imagining the countryside scene in my head, thus being more sympathetic.
In the two top pieces bellow, Hodgkin uses the wood as part of his paintings, I think this is an interesting idea in relation to my work because I have been working printed textures of wood, so maybe next I will work over actual wood.


Bibliography
Hodgkin, H., Smiles, S. and Stanley, M. (2010). Howard Hodgkin. Oxford: Modern Art Oxford.
(Howard Hodgkin prints 1977 - 1983. (1985). London: Tate Gallery Publications.)

Lino Prints and Oil Paint

The lino prints became more successful once I had worked into them with paint. There isn't necessarily more texture, but the scenes are more dynamic than they were before. Also, you could argue the backgrounds are based on the texture of wood, so the idea of texture is still there. I worked from my original photographs of the Suffolk landscape (without referring back to them that closely again), and allowing the lines from the prints to abstract the shapes I painted.






Lino prints
From looking at Astrup's painterly woodcut prints I wanted to do something similar. Using lino I cut out textures from close-up photographs of wood. I tried to make them as 'painterly' as possible by adding a lot of colour. The thick ink gave a really nice effect to the two whiter ones bellow. The other two prints I laid on the ink less thickly, and they weren't as successful, especially because I was trying to create texture.
In the bottom right print I placed the two different prints on above one another to see how it would create a landscape. I wanted to bring this idea of looking at textures close up, back to my original theme of landscapes. It did indeed create an interesting, abstract landscape, however I think I should work in to some of the prints with paint to develop the textures where there aren't many.
In relation to Astrup's woodcut prints, I think the marks I made are similar to the marks he made for bark/wood. I'm glad I went to his exhibition because it moved my project forward and I decided to look at texture textures closer up. This is when I thought of using the textures to create strange landscapes because the pieces I made are quite ambiguous, so I thought it would work well.