A quick catch up post about preparing for my Graduate Exhibition.

It was an incredibly enhausting time. We emptied our studios of all furniture, painted endless walls and floors and began setting out work across many rooms and booths. There were lots of challenges to hang a cohesive show, combining the work of over 50 artists into the one show was an incredible undertaking and not without it’s stressors. I was alotted a space to install my work quite late, which was a huge challenge for me. Normally I have days to prepare, to sketch and do colour experiements, but I almost had to enter the space dry. I found this so hard.

Sometimes things just don’t work.  Many times I have painting things in small scale and then tried them on a large scale and it just flopped.  That happened again recently.

It was the first time I attempted those random and deliberate brush marks in a large scale.  I had plans of linking the shape together and unfolding an installation across the room, in a similar way to these works on plywood, but the upscaling did nothing for the shape.  To me it just looked like the beginnings of a graffiti mural, which is not the content I want to bring to my work at this point (if ever).  As with before, it seems the problem was the size of my brush in relation to the size of the shape.  It may have worked if the shape had been half the size.  Or if it was filled in, which I have since started to do.

This still is from my latest painting experiment, this time with red, yellow and blue.  Are you seeing a theme with primary colours recently?

This is the most successful yet.  I was able to get the lighting right, a good camera and edit properly.  I’m learning a lot about the video process.  However, as you learn more about making video, you find there is so much more to know.  I enjoy making videos, but for the moment, that’s not where I want my focus to go.  So, they might just appear in my work now and then.

This work will form part of my assessment this semester and may turn up in some exhibitions in the future.

Here are some more works on plywood board.  It’s a wonderful material to work into, as it comes complete with a spatial or atmospheric kind of ‘background’, because of the wood grain surface.

I’m focusing on primary colours with my colour choices.  I think in terms of starting with red, yellow, blue and tweak them slightly.  The blue may become a light blue or royal blue.  The red I turn slightly to a hot pink or magenta by adding the tiniest bit of white or yellow, or go all the way to a fleshy tone.  The yellow I turn, either slightly or a long way, in the direction of orange.  There’s also some random green in one of these works, thrown in for good measure but unrelated to primary colours.  However, I must say, I think that work is the least successful in terms of colour palette.

I’m finding these adjustments are a great way to deal with colour.  The relationships between the colours are still largely based on primaries, but it alters my thinking about them and my fear of primary colours, inspired by art history’s fear.  While not quite ‘complementary’ colours, they still operate in a really illusory way.  Complementary colours naturally work amazingly to create optical illusions, because they are truly opposite colours.  These tweaked primaries have something at play also and I am deep in sorting it out as I go along.