Painting and theory

Because one part of my module is to create a printing portfolio and combine two techniques, I decided to use monoprinting and riso printing.

PART ONE: MONOPRINT
Monoprinting is a technique that is usually made either by transferring oil based paint on paper by ‘sketching’ on top of it (paper) or by erasing the paint with a cleaning medium and then its transfer onto paper.

My turn on this technique was to insert my own painting abilities and create printing paintings. The steps included using masking tape to mask out places that would not be painted.
The work requests continuous work, in this case creating of 18 paintings that have the same outline (picture source) and similar colour. The process has gone through risks and fails and now I finally found the right way to work quickly and efficiently.

Here is how few of the prints look at the moment. The paper is yellow-ish because it worked better with the colour palette.

Before pressing the paper onto the painting, it reminded me of cubism because of the sharper edges I created on the face. The type of cubism I am connecting to is the analytical one. Although my painting here doesn’t have the typical features of cubism, it still has something which made me think of it’s connection to it.
Here is the photograph and my painting next to it.

The connection could be slightly visible here in the work of Georges Braque. Maybe I should not say cubism, but the brushwork used in it.

The first side of my painting has been critiqued in our last university critique. The painting was overally apprecciated and lead to people having various thoughts about it. From reading my notes from that day, the fact that I painted on the back of the canvases made the painting more interesting and intriguing.  The painting therefore has inverted sections and creates a puzzle. This also created the feeling of hiding and showing something.

The painting, or more the painting style, reminded people of Claud Monét’s Water Lilies (1916-1919).

I do understand why; the painting’s style is fluid and creates a movement like my painting could try to represent. Maybe it could be just the colour palette.

The painting seemed like a play of depth of field. Susan Barnet mentioned that the painting looked different from a distance and sitting closer to it. It looks like its restraining and protecting. What was seen was also subversion: undermining something to call attention to something else.

07/04/2022
Since we had a chance to have a tutorial with artist Simon Carter at our latest exhibition Interim and my tutorial went overall well, I started following Simon on Instagram to learn more about his work as I became a huge fan. The reason for me to mention this is mostly because of the influence his work has had on mine for the past months.
My underpaintings are following a similar style to his drawings and my overall brush work has a flow and confidence that I started to see in his works.

The funny thing is the fact that I did not even see the relation of my work to his, but with him reacting to my instagram posts, I actually realised.

This is my work’s relation to his again, after overpainting the drawing.

For my degree project, I have decided to create a connection between sculpture and painting, hanging paintings in the middle of a corridor, creating a different way for paintings to be presented.

The narrative which I want to follow here is based on the theory and graph created by Jacque Lacan. Theory of The Gaze and the cones of vision. Because the Gaze is something which is positioned in the world and stares at us from various points, there is something like image/screen that protects the subject from the gaze and vice versa. That is what my work is going to be presenting. The middle point between the two (gaze, subject). The idea is to create photographs which would represent the subject (or the gaze; connecting slightly to the theory of the male gaze as it represents the gaze having an owner) which is right on top of the barrier protecting one another, giving the feeling of being almost in ‘danger’.

These photographs were taken using a frame (with glass), real leaves, (see through plastic thing which name im unable to google) and camera (I believe it was a Canon one).

Here is the sketch that I will be using for creating my proposal:

The idea is connected to my previous suggestion/ sketch at Hollywells park in Ipswich in the greenhouse building. The idea here was to use the ceiling as hangers for ropes that would get connected to the paintings.

23/03/ Tutorial with Charlotte Newson about my Degree Show proposal
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After giving a little sense of my proposal and work to Charlotte, I received questions about my color palette, my concept, and my context. As my context is connected to the theory of the gaze and Jacque Lacan, I wanted to create the feeling of being stuck to the screen/image as its the part of the graph created by Jacque Lacan that is supposed to hide/protect us from the gaze and the gaze from the subject.  Charlotte has mentioned that what message I want to give through my work has to be told right away in my Degree Show, which led me to the re-thinking of the whole work. Keeping my message and pushing it forwards a little bit more by creating a way to view the paintings that would be more unusual and uncomfortable. It is an Idea that CHarlotte gave me in the sense that viewing my work in a very narrow space might be helping the message to come across.

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The underpaintings done for my 1st idea.:

UPDATE N. 2: The ideas kept changing and in the end I stuck to the one I had at the start. The reason for my decision stands mainly at the point of the audience. Contrary to my past works, I really took the time to take in consideration the audience. One of the main issues would be the impossible way for people with disabilities to view my work without the danger of work falling, the inability to view it as others could etc. Basically taking away the opportunity to have the same experience given by the work to others.
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29/03/2022
Finishing of the first side of the painting and following my 1st idea.
Colour palette vise: I tried to follow Charlotte Newson’s words in which I was told that my colour palette tends to be slightly muted and related to one specific art group whose name she could not think of at that moment. I followed that and tried mixing the colour green with other types to create slightly muted colour palette for the skin. In the end, the whole painting looks not as muted as each of the colours looked like after mixing, but I still enjoy the vibrance of it.  What I enjoy about this painting is the abstract aspect of each painting that together creates a abstract/realism painting.

The format of paintings displayed
In today’s crit, some of the comments about the work were aimed on the format of the paintings, how they are displayed etc. One of the comments mentioned how the painting’s cropped format makes the viewer think of the editing in cinema. The cropping made the painting look more violent and like there is more to be said.. there was also a mention about the emotion with which they were cropped. Following comment was about how the paintings work together and how the meaning of the works wouldn’t come across as ‘violent’ and filled with narrative like now if they were separated. Matthew Bowman connected my work’s display to photographs of 1938s. The reason for that was that photography in that year was in a format in which the second picture that followed the previous one would explain more about the meaning of the first one. The same is in my paintings as the first, higher painting would not make sense of the narrative without the second one underneath.

The paintings (colour, scale etc.)
In the paintings, the viewers mentioned words like: The look, The Gaze, Voyeurism. Which are things actually connecting to my work. Voyeurism (or scopophilia) which is translated as the pleasure of looking. It is best described by Freud as one of the component instincts of sexuality which leads to the interpretation of a human as an object, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. That pleasure of looking then grows into perversion.

To that, I want to mention another comment by the viewers which was about the format of the painting being almost like a little hole, making them feel like they are the voyeurs themselves. It made the viewer to also follow the eye of the man shown on the lower painting. The gaze here seemed to them unsettling.

Work on poster, logo etc.
Because our final year includes few challenges, one of them is the interim exhibition. The interim exhibition marks the middle of our journey in the final year of our studies at the university of Suffolk.

In one part of making our exhibition, we had to come up with a logo that would be seen then everywhere along with the poster, brochure, online publication etc. I applied for that role as I have a past in the graphic design field (studied it in high school). I thought mainly about the fact that we are in the ‘middle’ which is why I created a logo like this.

this logo then had to go through many colour variations until we settled on the idea of having our posters etc. printed on the riso-printer. That then meant that the poster needed to be 3 colours the most to look nice a visually satisfying. Because our lecturer brought us some examples, the decision in the end was to use a yellow paper with pink text&logo. This was then the final look of our logo (the logo went through many changes in the case of measurements and details).

That logo was then used for the poster which I also put together along with the brochures, in which every artist from the exhibition had a statement + detail of the work exhibited.

Putting up the work in The Hold
On the 01/02/2022, after finishing all the preparations, me and my peers could finally put up the works in The Hold (where the exhibition will be taking place).

The main challenge were the walls that had to be re-painted, choosing whose work goes where and then measuring the spaces on the walls for fixing of the work.

After all of that was done, here is a picture of my paintings on the wall. The light at that point was not the best and there were some issues about fixing it, but its done and ready. Now we need to only put the brochures together, put labels on the walls and we are ready to go on the 4th of Feb.

Brochure
Today, on the 02/02/2022 I took part in the completion of brochures for the exhibition. Me and my lecturer did some changes in statements given in and then sent the whole brochure to print. After finishing that process, folding and stapling followed. I got a quick tutorial by the technician how to use the folding machine and was able to create beautiful brochures that are now in the space available to the public.