I’ve been moving between 4 pieces of work over the last couple of weeks. I’m eager to get these done so I can move onto something else. I don’t want to start another peice of new work and leave these unresolved. I understand my work a lot better now, so I feel better about my studio practice as a result. I was going at too fast a pace for a while and trying to do everything without taking time to analyse what I’ve been making. Going a bit slower sometimes helps, as does taking a step back.
I’ve ended up with maybe 3 or 4 pieces that I’m happy with through this process of thinking and researching that I’ve been going through since February, and feel that my work has jumped on a little bit. I’m quite looking forward to a future post that I’ll make where I’ll look through my work over a period of a year and see what has happened.
I’ve continued to explore my idea of lines/grids/cages/structures over the last week or so. This has interestingly led me back to looking at Mondrian, who a vaguely remember writing about when doing my dissertation. So I’ve found myself yet again re-visiting past ideas and interests. The thing I’m interested in are the lines and grids within Mondrian’s work and the conflict between conformity and individuality, a sense of struggle to keep a sense of spirituality in a fast moving world. I like this feeling of conflict.
I used photoshop the other day to play around with the some ideas, and then ended up actually doing it for real on the canvas as it seemed to work. I find this a fun way to work, and it’s useful too. A few days later I started doing stuff to another canvas, and thought to myself, “doh, I should’ve done this in photoshop, I’d have been able to undo it.” Never mind.
It feels like Spring today, and that always makes it easier for me to work for some reason. I always seem to be more productive during the Spring and the Summer. My aims for the next few days is to sort out my use of borders and layers in my work, to further look into my use of layering. I did some work last week, one looking like a grid, and one more like a collapsing grid. They didn’t seen related to each other until I looked at photos of them both on one sheet of paper. They use completely different techniques and materials but there is some relationship going on between the two of them. Something quite ordered and starting to crumble, and something complely falling to pieces. Both remind me of a broken cage or a skeleton/rib cage.
I managed to get to a couple of exhibitions over the last week. Danny Rolph at the Poppy Sebire gallery was good, I’ve been wanting to see those layered triplewall paintings for a while, and it was worth the visit. I also got to see Arshile Gorky at the Tate Modern, which was ace, especially seeing the development of the work through his career.
