VSW14 Painting: Materials and Methods (2) Finally we were allowed to play with colour ... as long as we followed the instructions carefully. In this cube (seen from both sides) we started from each of the primary and secondary colours and then vary saturation, tone and hue. I moved on to attack a still life, three times over, in which we used to investigate complementary colour, pointillism and tint. The final studio tasks were to transform some familiar spaces. For two studio works I chose my garden and my kitchen. 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.
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VSW14: Painting, Materials and Methods (1).
The first half of the course was completely black and white. That was a requirement. The giraffe, on the other hand, was optional. Somehow I couldn't get away from him; I hadn't realised that one exercise would lead to another. Suffice it to say that he's missing from only one of these pictures. VSW100 Art and Creativity is a sort of foundation unit in the Fine Arts Degree (2013).
It’s about process rather than product; it emphasises lateral thinking and surprising yourself. The first section was called “The Creative Mix” and was all about the cardboard box. Last year they did plastic buckets. We had to draw, photograph, brainstorm, demolish, reconstruct … all with no particular goal in mind. Boy, did I learn a lot! Above are a few of the scores of things I was forced to think of. Détournement involves the reuse of some cultural item – be it text, picture, sculpture, film or sound – in the creation of a new cultural item. Like plagiarism and quotation it involves the reworking of something already made by somebody else, but it is neither. French tourner is cognate with English turn (meaning both turn and express). Unlike plagiarism and quotation, détournement reuses elements to turn them back upon themselves in order to undermine or critique the source or meaning of the original. In the visual arts it is most closely associated with the Situationists. The irrational dream-based combinations of images of the Surrealistists may - to some degree - evoke similar associations. In VSW100 we were required to produce detourned collages and novel combinations. Below are two images of Margaret Thatcher and two works assembled around pieces of my aunt's china duck ornament.
VAR11 Visual Arts Research: Introduction to Drawing (2013).
So, an introduction: we covered line, tone and perspective. We drew in black and colour and we also made collages in white. We investigated the use of text in drawing. We collaged some more. Above all we learned that the modern drawing is not just putting line or shading on paper. Drawing extends beyond mark making into conceptual areas such as the drawing together of ideas and the possibility of using a variety of media to create three-dimensional works that can be considered drawings. ... Mmmm! I had some difficulty with this as a definition and created a test question about a 'drawing' from an exhibition that the New York Times reviewed on April 7th, 2013. Yes … and There’s also Raw Emotion, Life Experience and World View. (January 2013)
According to our course tutor there’s no point in looking and just liking or not liking. She often pushes us to see that our emotional response to a work depends on our personal worldview, and that knowledge about the artist and the context of his work can change that view. My first essay was to interpret the British artist Francis Bacon. After a while I saw what she meant. (Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946.) When I first googled it up, my emotional response was "What a horrible picture - hate it!" But I decided to write about it anyway since I had the chance to go to the Bacon exhibition in Sydney. I fell to thinking about the date of the picture and the way the essay question pointed us to war symbolism. I remembered the aftermath of the war in London: bomb sites, bad food, men in suits (all our fathers dressed like the figure in the painting); I noticed the umbrella and remembered the furled umbrellas that were often carried by politicians in newspaper photographs of the time. So I used this life experience and started googling stuff around politicians and umbrellas. Within an hour I'd built up an amazing plot involving Winston Churchill, the British intelligence service and the severe bombing of Coventry)!!!! That may all reflect my warped world view, but when I got to see the exhibition and to read material about Francis Bacon the new knowledge I picked up showed me how wrong I was. I found out that when it was exhibited in 1946 the public took it to be a comment on the war that had ended the year before. I also found out other stuff about Bacon that showed Painting could be interpreted in other ways (Freudian for example). So I decided to write about how Painting can have different interpretations, how it's ambiguous. Doing that reflects another aspect of my world view: I love puzzles and subtlety and I often find it hard to commit to a single interpretation of something. And I should add that, while I still wouldn't put a print of Painting (1946) on my wall, my appreciation of the work, as well as my respect for Bacon, grew all the time I was working on the essay. Doesn't presenting the same image in a different medium change the atmosphere? In January 2013 our brief at Camp Creative was to choose an artist and a subject of our own and to connect the two: not to make a slavish copy but to use the artist's style as a springboard and to see where it took us. We had a lot of Impressionists in the class, especially Cezannes. I was taken by Matisse's simplification and his pattern motifs, especially as I'd read that he used to work towards them on top of skilful representational paintings. I took along a collage of photographs from my visit to Bali last year; I thought I could assemble them onto a patterned canvas. My work is not finished so I'm only showing a detail. I can see that Matisse encouraged me to simplify and to crowd my composition, but I'm not certain that his influence is obvious.
In March 2013 I had my first experience of solar etching. The process is like sunbaking. You cover the parts on a photopolymer plate that you don't want to burn with absolutely anything at all. Those parts become the raised surface of the plate, from which you can print hundreds of copies. I drew my Balinese guardian onto a transparent plastic sheet with a greasy crayon, clamped that to the plate, then put them in the sun for 45 seconds. After a couple of minutes of washing and drying I was able to print. That simple! … possibly so, I thought in January 2013.
I always loved paintings (noun) and painting (verb), but somehow managed to sideline what could have been a life-long passion. One evening my computer screen flashed up the question “Have you thought about studying online for a BA in Fine Arts and Visual Culture?” No I hadn’t. But I filled in my name and phone number anyway, and went away for a week. I was still sleeping off my journey when the phone rang and an Open University councillor persuaded me to sign up. I started my first two units in November 2012: Internet Communications and Issues in Contemporary Art. They were taught out of Curtin University, on the other side of the continent, and I didn't even have to leave my living room. I decided to make a blog that would focus on what I encounter in my Fine Arts courses. I planed no agenda, no destination: just a journey of discovery as I meander among Old Masters and Modern Geniuses, creating some of my own art along the way. I've signed up at Thirty Painting in Thirty Days; anyone can join and people from around the world are sharing their work, one item a day during September. This is a sketch I did for Day Two: Sketch, watercolour on Arches satine paper, 14 x 19 cm. (#266 at http://new.inlinkz.com/view.php?id=557515)
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