VSW31 Fine Art Studio Practice
To complete my degree I am required to produce a coherent body of work suitable for presentation as a public exhibition.  

     We can do whatever we like, but we have been warned that third year standards are much higher than those in second year.  Our tutors seem to have been told to stop praising and encouraging, to raise the bar, and to focus on extending and challenging everyone.
     We should not plan to work in a particular medium.  We are expected to work with concepts, and choose materials depending on the demands of our concept.  So that we would explore widely rather than simply choose a topic, we chose three words to see where they are taking us.  I picked terra-firma, migration and memory and started writing about investigating “the processes by which we commit our memories to the land, and how it receives and releases memories of the people who belong to it or come to live on it.”
     During the first unit (one quarter of the project) I experimented with three related concepts, using mixed media:

​     Neither of us are excited about the Mapping, but my tutor likes the Palimpsest experiments while I prefer the Body in the landscape.  I have decided to interpret his insistence on the Palimpsest as an invitation to consider and politely decline his first challenge.
     I will resume work in March when I will be asked to add another word.  It will be impermanence.   My earlier work was about change and the cycles of existence (this fits with my meditation practice).  I have looked at decay and regeneration in terms of organic material and in terms of the rock cycle of coastal sandstones.  I feel a need to cycle back towards these ideas and to make it clear in my formal proposal that I intend terra-firma ironically.
    I’ve observed that students who are ahead of me haven’t had an easy time.  I don’t know where this adventure will take me, but I am not expected to start painting seriously for another twelve weeks and meanwhile there is still a lot of experimenting to do. 

​If a series is the smallest an oeuvre must be the largest grouping; it can include an artist’s life work, or all their significant artworks, their work to date.  Students can’t claim to have produced an entire oeuvre.  An artist’s oeuvre will have strong continuities in it, continuities that reflect their mature style, but which will develop and change over time. 

​The first series I attempted (in VSW21) was very tight: same size, same format, same colours and subject matter: so tight that it was easiest to paint them in production line mode as a group.  When it was finished I left my model pear to slowly decay on the studio table.  Then for VSW22 I covered a larger, square canvas with the same background paint and represented the pear slowly decaying.  In one way this is a series of five paintings, in another way it is a series of four with an outlier.  I was left wondering how much members of a series need to share.

In the next unit (VSW23) I set out to make series of paintings about my bedroom, but when I asked the tutor what makes a series they encouraged me to ‘work it out for myself.’  I asked FaceBook friends for their opinions, and they told me:

I concluded that works in a series must share something that an artist accords thematic status to.  This can be anything the artist wishes and is clever enough to elevate to that level.  Artists will always find new creative ways; they just have to present their work in a way that signals the connection.  Titles can help but visual clues are more important.  Series that are planned ‘top down’ are more likely be tight than series that are investigative or experimental. 
This explains my question about whether my pear series consists of four or five works, and it explains the difficulty I had in finalizing my bedroom series.  I had already put a window into each painting.  I hoped that this would be sufficient to connect them, but I also decided to experiment with applying the paint in a different way in each painting.  They were not even all the same size and shape. 

I did five things to help them com together:

1. trimmed two canvases to match the size of the others,
2. added a purple curtain to every window that didn’t have one yet,
3. left out one canvas where the purple curtain didn’t work,
4. think about their order,
5. imposed the same title on all.

​Where the Light Comes Through I-VII.  Acrylic and oil on canvas, 46x61cm.

Our shoreline is subject to remorseless weathering and erosion, and continuously recycles through natural processes of erosion, removal and deposition. Science refers to the water cycle, the rock cycle and biogeochemical cycles to trace the Law of Conservation of Matter at work. I have studied the shoreline at my home beach, Fishermen’s End, searching for evidence of changes in the rocks. My aim has been to interrogate the assumption that the ground we stand on is solid and unchangeable. 
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I have attempted to represent this ‘natural recycling’ through mixed media selected for their potential to reference the mutability of the land and the water as well as the physical materials of which they are composed.  My aim was to integrate a visual vocabulary consisting of lines, curves, cavities, deposits and textures with encaustic and pen and wash, two media which are both moveable and removeable. I also integrated natural materials – rock and pigment – collected at Fishermen’s End.

Studying art online requires a camera for submitting work, and we are also encouraged to use still photos in developing work and to experiment with video.  Below are two short videos and some series of still shot manipulations.
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Top: 'Edge to Edge' (33 secs), an exercise in manipulating shapes.
Centre: 'Piggery - the Final Cut' (1:09 mins), a reflection on animal slaughter.
Below: some painterly versions of simple snapshots.
Bottom: the original photographs.

These are the original snapshots:

This is an example of how Curtin University (through the OUA) teaches multiple techniques within a single project.  I enjoyed injecting some humour into this one and making it relevant to where I live.  I borrowed the title from my friend Helen Menzies’ successful children’s books.   Once I'd decided that I would locate 'imperfection' in the dangerous life our local ducks lead and issue them with a stern warning, all I had to do was work through eight ordered steps.

It took a mere five minutes to squirt the paint onto each canvas.  This is how they looked straight after pouring.

I titled the canvases around and then abandonned them overnight.  This is how they dried:

What  ideas about abstract art did I challenge?
       - that it is sacred and serious.
       - that it can’t convey a message.
       - that it lacks social function.

​Three of the Year Two painting units built on the basic introduction to texture, figure and field, tone, colour and transformation given in Year One.  It was a tremendous learning curve, and relied upon vast amount of experimentation.  When I look over my outcomes I feel that only a few look finished.  Given the huge amount that was expected in a very short time frame, plus the different concerns of all the exercises, this isn’t really surprising.  But it was all worth the effort.  Below are some of my more interesting outcomes.

​The first year BA drawing unit surveyed a range of drawing activities but in Year Two the units became very skills centred.  The focus was on line, shape and tone in Drawing A and on perspective drawing, shape morphing and layering in Drawing B.   The exercise arcs spanned the simple, the difficult, the imaginative and the impossible.  Sometimes I didn’t understand what I’d been practicing until I finished and my outcomes were often unexpected.  Below are some of my favourite drawings.  Buried behind all those enjoyable activities were hours and hours of skills practice, the sort of practice I could continue with indefinitely.  Thanks to Dr Ben Joel for conceiving and delivering the units.

 
These self portraits in silhouette combine line, shape and meaning:

To emphasise dark tones and contrast ​we had to imagine an underground cave, with lit candles on a floating table:

​Then we set up an all-white still life to practice drawing at the light end of the scale. I chose a memento mori theme:

​Perspective required a lot of attention:

Finally I experimented with both planned and unplanned approaches for the exercises in layering.  In the top two I combined a lot of drawings, seven on the left, ten on the right.  The two at the bottom involved putting bamboo pen drawings over ink marbling.

Bottom right is the first pen and wash I did.  On an  afternoon in Montmartre, exhausted, I sank onto a café chair and did my first pen and wash, just  the scene in front of me.

​Going through this process taught me a lot about developing an artwork rather than just jumping in.  I wonder what Utrillo would have thought of my version.  I'm sure he would have been happy about the plaster-of-Paris and real leaves

What a rollercoaster!  Equipped with a Study Guide that said there were some very good videos on YouTube, I found myself googling how to make a linocut and new things like monotype and collograph.  This was definitely new territory. We had to choose a single theme and stick with it for twelve weeks.  I decided to respond to the decay process of a mallard duck that had the misfortune to die in my garden.

To transform a real space I decided to brighten up the metal fence outside my studio.  I painted stripes that could echo the stripes imposed by the sun at different times of day.