Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Clay Heads

These are the two clay heads that I created in response to some of my earlier paintings. I'm happy with how they came out although it is almost a bit too obvious what they are trying to be - they are somewhere between being messy lumps of clay and busts. I found it difficult to make them not too much of either; any details of shape I added such as eye sockets, cheekbones or noses made them look slightly comical, but by removing those details they have become somewhat shapeless. They should make sense when seen in context with the rest of the work however.

I painted them black to begin with and then lightly went over this with a metallic gold paint to create the illusion of them being being cast in metal. Although there is not much reason for me to have done this I think they would look good for the degree show is they actually were cast in metal or painted in the way to emulate a metal finish. This finish is what I always imagined them looking like and I don't think painting either a flat colour or painting details on would be suitable, they just need something to emphasise the shape and texture which the gold paint does well.



Concertina book

I was originally planning on binding the concertina to make a book with French folds, but due to a few reasons will leave it as a concertina. One reason was that is was fairly expensive to have the book printed and I'm really happy with how hat backs of the pages look - the colour is really bright and crisp, so I don't want to hide the texture between the pages. Another reason is that if it were stitched it would only be so you could tear it open anyway, which I don't think anyone would do during the assessment of the work or at the degree show. Lastly where I have folded and glued the concertina together there are small discrepancies in the page size which would be very obvious down the spine were is bound, but less so when it is stretched out as a long book.



Friday, 16 May 2014

Alberto Giacometti

Some of the outcomes of my previous painting experiments have been almost sculptural and so I want to take my work into three dimensional models. I immediately thought of the textures used in Giacometti's sculptures and how I could find a way of working this into my own work. The proportions have been exaggerated and pushed to their limits in some cases, but because of the way we project our image onto everything looking for the face or form in a shape they are still recognisable.

I plan on making a few clay heads using my own paintings as a starting point or reference but really trying to work with the material and letting the way it cracks and behaves to influence the outcome. This is in part because I think it is a natural progression for my work but also referencing the severed heads on sticks Marlow sees at Kurtz's camp. 




Anthony Cudahy

Anthony Cudahy paints scenes from films, videos and photographs. When painting from a moving image he embraces the artifacting and distortion of a VHS or digital recording. This 'levelling' of certain areas of light, colour or shade is something that I really like, and the subtle use of texture to define features. The way paint has been layered gives the characters a translucent and ghostly quality. His choice of colour is often far from reality and working in oil a single brushstroke can combine multiple areas of different colour blurring the image and the lines between the reality of the photographic reference and some dreamlike place the paintings inhabit. 





Francis Bacon

Bacon is an obvious point of reference when trying to depict a face or portrait in an unsettling and distorted way. These portraits have a somewhat cubist element to them using geometric lines to divide areas of colour and the shifting and relocation of features on the face. There is a feeling of movement in all three of these paintings due in part to the brush stokes but also because of the way the features seem to 'swim' about following curves that look like ripples in water.




Erik Svetoft

Some of the portraits painted on acetate reminded me of Erik Svetoft's gruesome drawings where the human head or body are somewhere between biological diagrams and haunting creatures. This play on form is very interesting to me as the image below is still recognisable as a bust, yet has no human characteristics. It might be good to see how far away from the human form I can get in terms of shape or lack of detail for the image to still be read as a face.





Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Sign painting

Having seen this trailer for a documentary about sign painting I have been interested in the process:



I have hand lettered some type on the front of my sketchbooks but recently have decided to put some more effort into learning the correct techniques and to practice my strokes rather than just copying a font found on a computer.