University Campus Suffolk

After experimenting with a more expressive and rough approach to painting from my family photographs, I decided I wanted to create a similar effect on a larger scale.

From my family albums I selected what I believe is a typical family photograph of my Mum, Sister and I at Great Yarmouth, poking our heads through one of those comical photo opportunity boards on the pier. The pinnacle of a family trip to the seaside.

I wanted the painting to be quite bright to reflect the vibrancy of the seaside and to represent the clichéd image of the beach with yellow sands and clear blue skies. I therefore dripped watered down blue and yellow acrylic onto the paper to create a backdrop on which to recreate my chosen photograph.

The images within this post demonstrate my progression with this painting.

As mentioned previously, the decision to use drips in my work wasn’t a pre-determined action. I think the reason I started to use this method was to create works quickly as if I was trying to capture a moment before it was gone forever. What I was attempting to create was a piece of work which still contained some formal and more painterly elements whilst embodying an expressive quality which reflected my inability to accurately remember this time in my life.

It is interesting to think about the conciseness of the photograph which I am working from in relation to the approach I have taken with my painting. It is almost as though I do not entirely believe the truth which the photograph tells me about this event and I’m fighting against it. The simplicity of this drip method has the ability to reflect the vulnerable and fragile aspect of memory and directly represents what little I remember of these trips to the beach.

I want to continue experimenting with this approach to painting but would like to utilise the anaglypta paper mentioned in a previous post. Using this type of material as a canvas will, I hope, create a more interesting effect to communicate some of these concepts as well as making a direct reference to my childhood experiences.

After producing some monoprints which demonstrated a more confessional element within my work, I decided to create some rough paintings which also included text and imagery from photo albums.

These were formed with acrylic paint on A3 cartridge paper as experiments to explore whether I could achieve the same effect with these materials as with the monoprints.

Given the expressive nature of a few of these rough paintings, it was bound to be more difficult to use text which fit in with this approach. I am beginning to question the use of text in my work at all. I think it works within the more confessional pieces but as I sift through my family photographs, I am becoming increasingly nostalgic and wish to linger upon the positives as opposed to the negative aspects of my life.

The same dripped effect is evident in these paintings as is apparent on my anaglypta experiment. This is becoming a common feature in my work although I am not entirely sure where this has come from. I am going to run with this idea and see where it takes me.

On my first day back in the studio after London I knew I just had to throw myself into my practical work with some experimentation.

After previously working with anaglypta wallpaper in my second year of university, I felt this to be something I could also utilize in this project. Whilst I find it incredibly interesting to work with, there is also a link between this wallpaper and my childhood.

I will always remember the awful pale yellow anaglypta wallpaper which covered the walls of the hallway at the house I grew up in. I often sat on the stairs peeling it off! This is just one of the little details, mentioned in an earlier post, that I wish to include in my art work during this project.

I, therefore, decided to begin experimenting with this material by attaching the end of a roll to the studio wall and letting it fall down onto the floor. At this point I did not have a lot of imagery from my family albums in the studio and so, for the sake of just experimenting, decided to create the figure of a woman on the paper using acrylic paint in an expressive manner.

The colours used were merely reflective of my conflicting mood at the time, angry but determined. The contrast of the red and black paint on the white paper did, however, come out a lot better than I initially expected. By watering down the acrylic and dripping it from a height onto the anaglypta, it gave the medium more freedom to flow with little control from myself.

The pattern upon the wallpaper played a large part in the overall effect of the piece, something else which I had very little control over. With the combination of the protrusion of the pattern and the thinned aspect of the paint, the drips largely found their way around the bumps which emphasized their presence.

As I reflect upon this piece I wish it had more validity in regards to subject matter. I feel I would be more positive about it if it had contained imagery from my family photos to be in keeping with my etchings, drawings and project overall. The experiment has been integral, however, in determining how I can utilise the paint and wallpaper together to create an interesting effect. I plan to mount the wallpaper onto spare canvases I have in my space and to create more expressive works but this time using imagery from my photo albums.

I realise I have not reflected a great deal on my actual work in the studio over the last week or so. My focus on here has certainly been upon reviewing the exhibitions I visited in London. Worry not, there has been plenty of activity in the studio which I shall be discussing on here very, very soon.

Firstly, I must finish off my documentation of my London visit by revealing my thoughts regarding the David Hockney print exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Given my love of working with print, I felt it would be incredibly beneficial to see some Hockney prints to be able to study the approach this artist takes towards creating work in this way, specifically the way he executes etchings which is incredibly relevant to my current work.

I have always felt the need to include a high level of detail and contrast within my etchings, replicating the original image to my best ability. On viewing Hockney’s etchings, I began to consider the various ways an etching can be created effectively without it becoming too illustrative, something which I think is a bit of an issue for me.

In such prints as ‘Celia’ and ‘In Despair’ Hockney demonstrates a more understated approach to the etching process. The surroundings remain simple and unambiguous whilst only slightly more detail is used to emphasize the character of the figures within.

Detail is something which is very rarely missing from my work, I guess I struggle with simplifying anything too much in the worry that it won’t reflect what I want it to. Especially with etchings I think I have the tendency to cram as much detail in as possible to encompass the whole area of the print. I’m not sure my approach to etching will change at this particular point in my project as my aim is to give a true representation of my family photographs within the typical 6×4 format. As I continue further with my etching plates I feel I am developing in regards to my mark making and knowing how best to achieve a certain effect in relation to the nature of the image.

What Hockney’s exhibition did make me realise was the variation of visual effects which can be produced from print-making techniques. Printing for me is quite often black and white and it would be interesting to inject more colour into my work through means of perhaps screenprinting, colourgraphs and colour monoprinting.

Since the start of my 22 etching series I have been predominantly thinking about other series’ I can produce. What I shouldn’t rule out, however, is perhaps making different types of prints from just one image and reflecting upon which techniques work best. It is this point which empasizes my need to think in greater depth about the aesthetic outcome of a work and how it represents both the original image I am working from and my intentions of what I am trying to communicate.

If any exhibition is going to demonstrate the vast parameters of contemporary art today it is the current Martin Creed show at the Hayward Gallery.

At a point where my confidence regarding my artwork was not particularly high, this exhibition space offered an array of work which opened my eyes up to the possibilities. From a screwed up paper ball to a massive rotating neon sign, Creed’s work is certainly successful in questioning the extent to what art can be.

Walking around the exhibition I find myself relating more to these works than many others I have seen at the exhibitions discussed previously. The familiar aspect of many materials used by Creed, such as lego and balloons, injects a sense of playfulness into the artwork, reminding the viewer that art does not always have to be taken so seriously. This point can be further unravelled when taking on board Creed’s view on conceptual art which can be found printed within the exhibition leaflet;

‘I don’t believe in conceptual art. I don’t know what it is. I can’t separate ideas from feelings…Work comes from feelings and goes towards or ends up as feelings. It is a feeling sandwich, with ideas in the middle.’

This point, I think, relates greatly to many in the artistic community. Many times I have heard the phrase ‘I did this because I wanted to. Why does there have to be a complicated reason for it?’ What Creed does therefore is make it ok to do something just because you felt like it. The randomness of the collective work shown at ‘What’s the Point of it?’ I believe further illustrates this, referencing a vast amount of different ideas and feelings.

If what Creed intended was to make the viewer feel a certain way with his work, there is no piece where this is more evident than Half the air in a given space (1998). In this installation, the artist captures half of the air in the room in white balloons, challenging how the space can now be perceived by the viewer. In all honesty, as I waded through the sea of balloons my thoughts did not even turn to the effect Creed had created. Overcome with a feeling of happiness, I found the experience just really enjoyable, like the artist had created a bubble closed off from the outside world where the only thing you were permitted to do was have fun.

My experience within the installation, therefore, reiterates the importance of being able to have feelings about an artwork instead of desperately attempting to decipher the complex meaning to it all. This is a principle I can definitely take on board during my current project given the nostalgic nature of my sourced material.

As mentioned, I believe in one of my very first posts on here, I need to consider whether I am making the work for me, to discover myself, or making the work so the viewer can make their own discoveries. I suppose when using family photographs the viewer will always inherently make some connection between these familiar images portraying family life and the ones they too own.

I think it is integral for me now to really deliberate how I feel about certain photographs and to create work from the ones I feel most strongly about. Up until now, many of my decisions have been based upon the compositional nature of photographs and focusing on how they will come out when, for example, transposed into a dry point etching. I am beginning to find my way out of this maze, however, since my recent epiphany regarding my feelings towards my family trips to the seaside. I plan to keep focusing upon photographs which epitomize these particular memories in the hope that whoever views my work will also relate to these in some way.