ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [2 September 2009]

I'm back! I've decided to start a new blog as my last one ran its course and was going for about a year. I wasn't an active enough blogger, but I hope that my attitude will change with my new blog. I've just been lurking around Artists Talking for the last couple of months reading everyone elses blogs which has been very insightful. There is quite a community on here now. I think my work moved forward a fair bit last year, and I had lots of encouraging comments and feedback from the two exhibitions that I took part in over the summer. I'm now working my way through my ideas list in my sketchbook, as well as working back into existing work.

# 2 [8 September 2009]

I've just been keeping up the making of work this week, I've been fairly productive and have been flirting with colour, and then running away back to the safety of black and white. I began to add single blocks of colour to my work as a distraction and something unexpected, which has backfired as I seem to do it too often now. I feel as if I need a reason to use colour, and 'because I feel like it' isn't a reason.

Double layered canvases, made using polythene instead of canvas has been the order of the day today. It has a skin like texture and and stretches nicely around the frame. Hitting it with a stick will pierce it though. drying paint can be scratched away revealing what was underneath. I painted a torn piece of paper that looks as if it has come apart, as you move around the 'canvas' the rectangle breaks apart and comes together. I'm not sure about the blue though.

I have written some thoughts about it in my sketchbook, I'll share them here:

movement, 3d (fake), breaking, moving apart, coming together, connecting, disconnecting, the tearing of something uniform, recognisable shape being deconstructed/fragmented, a grounding, negative mark, something safe being broken.

My sketchbooks these days are all just a collection of words and scribbles jotted down as I paint.

If you want to see the painting working in a movement kind of way (does that make sense?) I've got a quick video clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBqB4MJXa8

# 3 [11 September 2009]

I've been building some little things out of cardboard and cellophane and painting on them, they are just small models at the moment to see how they sit with my ideas. One of them is made from 4 small frames that have some cellophane attached and that have been painted on. I kind of like it and I'd like to build a full size one, so that it is a painting that you can walk into and move around in.

I later moved onto a larger model, using polythene instead of the cellophane, it isn't as transparent, a bit more ghosty. It was hanging from my ceiling with some tape, looking rather fragile and sorry and I thought it was a bit of a joke and just left it and went home. Today the structure was found fallen, half over a small stool and half on the floor, all deformed and broken. I've started 2 big drawings of it/from it. It is far more interesting now having fallen. It looks like a sorry sight. Maybe I will make a series of drawings of the structure as it is rehung and brought back to life.

# 4 [24 September 2009]

Last week was an annoying week. I hit one of those dry spells and wasn't feeling it with anything I was producing. I made some large drawings of the fallen box, but I found it hard to get into the work making process all week, so I felt frutrated all week and into the weekend. Looking back now though, I quite these large drawings, so i'll continue to make them.

On Friday, it was suggested that I try using this window film, the kind you use to insulate windows and make them like doub;e glazing, I didn't know such a thing existed, thanks Laura. I found out that Homebase sold such a thing, and bought some. It comes as quite a large sheet, about 5ft x 8ft. I tested some out on an old stretcher and used the 'special tape' that came with it and then used a hairdryer, and as the instructions described 'magic' happened (it tightened up nice and strong). It looks good, totally transparent, and tough enough to work on. I got stuck right in with some oil paints and pigments, and scratched into the surface with sandpaper. The surface did go wrinkly, but the hairdrier sorted it out. I'll be trying out some acrylics on this surface today, and working on 2 layers again, in black and white.

So, so far I've experimented with the following: Voile - translucent and nice to work with, nice substitute for canvas. Polythene sheet - translucent but not as seethrough as I'd hoped, stretches well, but you can't get the folds out. Cellothane - transparent, doesn't like being stretched, nice for a using on it's own though, it will tear really easily. Window film - transparent, stretches really well, suprisingly tough, tightens with heat. So I've found my new material. Maybe.

# 5 [30 September 2009]

I still feel as if I'm in a bit of a late September slump, but I've been getting on with it. I decided it was time for a big studio clear up, as you can see from the pictures, it was a bit untidy, so clearing my space will help clear my mind a bit.

I continued to work small scale, playing with the clear film in the place of canvas around a stretcher frame. I found out that indian ink and acrylic ink is the stuff to use, it gives all kinds of nice translucencies, and washes, some brush marks show up, and sometimes it's all blurred.

You can put a load of acrylic paint on, let it dry and peel it off, and use masking tape to take layers off. There seems to be lots of scope. But I keep looking longingly at my bundle of canvas and some big stretchers, so I may scale back up and revert to canvas/hessian for a few days and try scaling up with the clear film too. And I need to get cracking with my walk-in-able painting too now I have some clear space.

I'll be heading into London in a few days for some much needed inspiration, hopefully that will end my slump for a while.

# 6 [7 October 2009]

I've been going in 2 directions this week. I've been eager to put oil paint on a big canvas and get the oil paint smell going again. This has come about mainly due to me pulling out a canvas from about a year ago and just having a look at it. It looks better now than how I remembered it. It looks raw and almost effortless, I like the rushed look, although it certainly wasn't rushed, there is lots of bare canvas, some charcoal marks, something that could be figurative, it's unfinished quality. After playing about for some weeks with cardboard, I decided to build a cardboard model of a part of the painting. The drawings of the fallen box seemed to do something for me, so I wanted to explore this route a little further. I then made up a large canvas, the size of the old painting and started work, working from the cardboard model and what was left of that fallen box from the other week and the resulting drawings. So I'm making a painting of a 3D model of a painting. A different starting point, but what does it all mean?

So the see-through paintings, or rather the ink on plastic pieces, these remain ongoing. I like that they are small and can easily be picked up and moved around. I was writing in my sketchbook some ideas about what these pieces of work are about. I made some interesting discoveries during this process of looking and writing. I was thinking about disguise, maybe that one layer is trying to disguise itself by using another layer, and this thought led me to the idea of cealing oneself. The thing is the layers are transparent or translucent, so it's not a great place to hide. I then re-wrote the old notion of trying to look closely to see beneathe the surface to see what is really going on, which led me to think about false identities, different realalities. I'll be continually thinking about this, and will probably find it hard to sleep as it's been on my mind constantly, which actually might be a good thing.

# 7 [26 October 2009]

I've just been trying to reflect on my recent works in progress this last week. I tried a few more things out, notably collaging bits of drawings onto the plastic film and then using glue and pigment to draw onto the plastic. I was worrying that my work looked too lifeless and cold, with nothing to it whatsoever. I scribbled over them with an oil stick and felt better.

Went to the Frieze art fair, but probably should've gone to Zoo instead, I could only really afford to go to one, and my art fair buddy was up for Freize. It was ok, got some ideas from looking at the work and had a some good conversations about it. There was some stuff that was really relavent to my work at the moment.

I was glad to see that the a-n forums have kicked off, I've made a few posts already and i'm looking to see how it develops. There is a lack of imagery on there at the moment, but I did spot that a few people had avatars last night. It's good to see a few people from the blogs making posts on there. I wonder how the forums and the blogs will co-exist, is there room for both? I hope so. We will see what happens.

# 8 [2 November 2009]

I was thinking about my work whilst trying to sleep last night, and before that whilst trying to get over a headache. Why do I think about my work at the most inappropriate moments? I was probably worrying. I was worrying mainly about the two directions in which my work appears to be heading. The large oil paintings based on cardboard models (based on things that I've picked out from earlier work) that have been left to fall apart. I ended up working like this before I left the studio before the weekend, and it frustrated me as I couldn't, in my head make it fit with my current ideas and where I want my work to be heading. Maybe these things will stay separate for a little while, maybe the 2 directions actually relate well to each other but I'm unable to see it yet.

I was thinking of boundaries anyway, and boundaries within painting, and within my work. I came up with things like 'paint as a boundary', 'the stretcher as a boundary', something I am already touching on with the see-through surfaces. I started thinking about the torn shapes and geometric shapes as a kind of visual boundary and of colour as a distraction, again something I've been touching on. I then started thinking about putting a physcial boundary on or in the way of my work. This links to using paint as a boundary, so maybe I'll paint over a piece of work and that'll be done - making a painting, maybe the best thing I've ever painted and then painting over it. The orginal would still exist, but it would be obscured by the new layer of paint, it would be a blank surface. I would kill my work in a way. I wrapped up a painting in some see-through wrapping today, but that didn't really do anything for me.

I was also thinking about using shadows as a boundary after seeing some light hit a painting. I've been attaching wooden bars and bits of board to canvases over the last year or so, so I'll take that further. I also though about making a cast of a painting, but I don't know how to do that, so that's something to look into this afternoon, i can imagine getting a very cold feeling from seeing casts of my paintings, hmmm.

Anyway, I have far too many ideas jotted down in my sketchbook, so I need to act on them quickly before the sketchbook ends and I forget about them. Thinking is good, but doing is better.

# 9 [12 November 2009]

In my last post, I planned to work on some small canvases all around the theme of boundaries. I spent most of last week making and thinking about these small pieces. They aren't pieces of work as such, more of a result of what was going on in my head at the time. One of the small canvases had it's mark, or part of it's pictorial space extended onto the studio wall. I've seen it done before, but I just found that it was something that I wanted and maybe needed to do. This got me thinking about breaking the boundaries of the canvas. I also used colour as a boundary and used big areas of black and white, but they weren't really happening the way I had imagined.

I had some fun projecting both my see-through paintings and the caerdboard models (based on sections of my paintings) onto the studio wall. The work on the transparent film worked nicely for a first try, lots of subtle marks were projected into the space and it certainly gave my work a completely different feel. The cardboard wasn't as succesful due to the more definate shadows. I guess the next aim would be to try to cut out a surface, in a way that shows the sponteneity of my marks, and try lighting that.

The week ended with me making a double layered plastic film box stretcher thing with a 'sheet' of screwed and folded up acrylic paint inbetween. I asked myself what the boundary was, the acrylic sheet? The plastic film? It has got me thinking more about space. The acrylic paint sheet was made by painting onto a surface the size of the stretcher, it was then folded and jammed into a space it's own size, but took up only a part of that space. The paint is trapped between the surfaces that it was meant to be painted onto. So I guess the plastic sheets are trapping the paint and are therefore the boundary here.

Looking through my sketchbook this morning at some notes I made on the train on the weekend, I came across something that I had written that has got me thinking, Am I killing my own work by trying to move it forward?

# 10 [23 November 2009]

Just been continuing playing with paint this week. I did lots of tearing paint off of the plastic surfaces to leave ragged edges, and also folding up sheets of plastic and paint and collaging it. Making layers with paint and then removing parts of these layers made up a large part of last week. I've been working with a 'control layer', followed by a 'expression layer' followed by further 'controlled layers' and so on. Sometimes it seems to work, other times it looks terrible.

I don't feel the need to scale back up again yet. At first, it felt a little false making work on a smaller scale, but as long as I see these as just experiments, that is ok. When I scale back up again, maybe I'll feel liberated.

The images here are some of the more interesting test pieces. Using varnishes and glazes and then tape to remove and tear the semi dry paint has been fun.