University Campus Suffolk

My tutors have suggested that I look at Patrick Caulfield as an example of an artist who paints simplified images with limited colours, and hihlights specific points of his compositions, either with colour or pattern which is excluded in the rest of the painting. The idea of me replicating this in my own paintings is that I think more carefully about my compositions, and either make my paintings patterned all over and multicoloured, as in the Lavenham interior painting – or greatly limit the colours and patterned areas for striking and simple compositions, as in my second version of the Lavenham staircase painting.

I will experiment with this idea, and to demonstrate the kind of images I could produce to create a more empty and unreal effect, I have included some examples of relevant Patrick Caulfield images.

I find Interior with a Picture interesting because of the contrast between the patterned wallpaper and the plain blocks of colour used to indicate the walls and top of the stairs, which is also juxtaposed with the great detail with which the picture on the wall has been painted. I think that these differences give the image a strange and slightly surreal appearance.

Another interesting image is Caulfield’s Second Glass of Whisky (1992) which captures an unseen interior in night-time blackness, giving the feeling of sitting alone in a room in the middle of the night, which also creates a dreamlike atmosphere. The white squares on the black walls suggest moonlight coming through a nearby window.

Here is a painting which I did of the staircase in The Swan.

First of all I did a sketch of the staircase from the photograph, and then put the sketch onto the computer to allow me to ‘paint’ colours onto it without wrinkling the paper!

This was a very time-consuming process which I did on photoshop by using the fill tool, and but also had to reselect most of the different sections by drawing round them manually to prevent the colour from leaking into other parts of the picture. After I had completed it, I made several different versions by altering the colour saturation on the computer, and by using the photoshop ‘puppet warp’ tool to distort parts of the interior.

However, for this painting I decided to stick more to the original colours of the subject, to see what atmosphere this could create, before trying paintings in the style of my ‘computer paintings’.

First of all I painted the area behind the stairs in this picture with various colours, and yellow-ochre streaks that extended over the stairs to give the appearance of slight disintegration.

I also included variation of tone and linear aspects of the objects wthin the image, eg the beams.

However, when I showed the painting to a tutor they suggested that I took areas of pattern out eg on the stairs, and simplified my colours down into blocks to give the image more impact and focus.

They also suggested that I made the beams darker to contrast from the background.

And so I painted over the pattern on all of the stairs but one, as well as painting over the beams in black and painting over the area above the stairs in a solid block of orange.

While I think that this made the stairs more striking, I am not sure whether these changes helped with the ‘unreality’ aspects of the picture, or simply made it look more abstract. I also preferred the area above the stairs with the streaks before I painted over it.

One of the main ideas of simplifying the image was to isolate areas of pattern and therefore make them more significant. One area where I think this has been successful is the orange pattern on the beam on the right-hand side of the composition, which I have added to and outlined in black to make it more striking, while eliminating pattern in other areas of the image.

Here is an image of my recent painting of the interior of the historic pub / hotel The Swan in Lavenham.

I found this interior particularly challenging to paint because of its complexity.

I painted it in bright colours to give it a more contemporary atmosphere, despite the architecture, and also applied some areas of paint very thinly to give it an insubstantial appearance in some places.

I also painted the scene in a rather disjointed way, making it appear as if the different parts were almost hovering together, rather than appearing as a corporeal building. Instead it is more of a kaleidascope of shifting colour and pattern, giving the sense of an interior without actually presenting it in its physical state.

Here are some prints that I created in a reduction print class.

I composed the image from two different images that I had in my sketchbook; one an ink drawing of a doorway in my house, and one a photo of the rocking chair that I have been using throughout this project. I drew the two images together on the lino, forming them into a single interior. I then cut out the parts of the lino that I wanted to stay white, and inked up the plate to do my first print.

I really liked the mixture of black and yellow, when the stencil was inked up, more than I liked the actual prints that I obtained from it. The point of reduction printing, I was told, is to progressively cut away the stencil, adding a different colour to your existing prints each time in this way, until the image on your stencil has been completely cut away.

Because I preferred my stencil to my actual prints, however, I decided not to do this, and had to find a different method of creating multi-coloured prints. And so to apply more colours, I first inked up my stencil yellow again, and then added more colours by carefully adding more colours on top, either with a cotton bud or with smaller rollers, which worked well.

In this way I created two different multi-coloured prints, after which I inked up my stencil with yellow again and left it to dry, so that I could keep it as a separate piece.

After reading through my blog I have decided to add a post about the progression of this project as a whole.

I originally planned to focus on contemporary interiors, but am generally more drawn to historical ones and keep on finding more interiors of this kind that I think would be good to use for my project of interiors and unreality.

For this reason I have decided that what I am the most interested in is representing interiors, whether old or new, in a contemporary way, in the way that they are painted, and the colours that I use.

After a tutorial, I have decided that the interiors which work best in creating a sense of unreality are the ones which are built from a mixture of different images, and imagined space. In this way they are depicting emotional rather than physical space, and focus more on atmosphere than representation.

This also links to the methods of Dalwood and Weischer, both of whom form their interiors by making a collage from different pieces of interior magazines, then painting these images on a larger scale in a single composition, to create images with a disjointed appearance and strong sense of unreality.