Mark Making & Site Specific Project
First day on our HE course, today we had an induction to the course and talked about what we would be doing and giving our input into what we wanted to gain from the course, and what we expected from our tutors etc... We also took part in several activities involving turning paper into 3 dimensional sculptures, these tasks were simple, enjoyable but also encouraged us to use our heads. Along with this we also gave our own interpretations of what art & drawing is to us. To the left is an image of my work book page filled with different quotes about what art is to me and others.
For the first part of today we began researching into some artists; Da Vinci & his Vitruvian man, Tatlin's Tower, Leon Ferarri & John Cage. After this we moved onto more practical work starting off by feeling for our heartbeats and pulse and then completing a line study to the rhythm. Afterwards we completed studies of walking in a circle, first slowly then at a faster pace then one step at a time. My studies for these were incredibly similar with only a few aspects changing between each exercise. Following on from this we had to visualise an object after hearing the word 'brain' and then write it down. I pictured a 'skull'. Next we needed to introduce an action to go with our word and then exaggerate it, and then do a line study of this action.Finally we combined elements from all of these individual studies and composed them together onto an A1 sheet working in a variety of black & white medias.
Last Tuesday I started a 6A1 (6 sheets of A1 paper) composition based on our umbilical mind chords, today I continued working into this and started blacking out the background. Today I began to focus upon the motif of naughts and crosses and began making marks of naughts and crosses throughout my piece. I feel as though I achieved something today, especially with the top right corner as it looks well thought out and considered and I will be moving on in the future to do the rest of the background and the foreground in a similar style to this and I will also look at introducing other materials into my work.
As a starting point today I began by focusing on small sections of my A1 composition and my 6A1 naughts and crosses piece. For the second part of the day I took these compositions and started mono printing. I feel like this helped me to understand mark making in both positive and negative space.
Today I continued with my 4A1 composition layering over certain aspects with more media to slightly alter the tone and to fill in over white space. I feel like I have been successful with this composition with my use of media and keeping it gestural.
Today I started off by carrying on with my naughts and crosses composition, focusing on the background at first. I began by applying a darker colour before working over the top in white and light tones of grey. I feel as though this was successful and the darker tones with lighter tones on top helps to define the larger circle that has become the foreground of my piece. Also I have been slightly inspired by space in this as the circle reminds me of a planet.
After working on the background I wanted to move onto the foreground of my piece and start filling in some of the white space as it was looking bare, I incorporated the arm movement study relating to the word 'skull' and then carried this on down the full length of the piece.
This afternoon we had our first life class session and I really enjoyed it, as opposed to the traditional proportional line drawing that I had become a custom to after two years, we instead related it to our project work and picked out lines and shapes from the body and composed them on the page incorporating a range of black & white media such as; ink. graphite, charcoal, paint, chalk. I also experimented with applying ink to a piece of material then printing that onto the page leaving a texture and the ink on the page. I really enjoyed this session as it was really interesting to go from making marks based on heartbeats, pulses and naughts & crosses etc... to using the human body as a starting point instead.
Today I wanted to try something that would look different to the other pieces of work that I had done, so using an A1 sheet of black card I focused on a section of my larger 6A1 naughts and crosses pieces and used a range of white media in order to complete it. I really like this piece of work and the composition I chose for it works really well in this style, it's a busy composition and it captures a chaotic element that has been present in the majority of my pieces of work throughout this project.
After completing a couple of A1 compositions today I decided to scale up and work bigger, starting off with 3 sheets of A1 paper I took the entire top half of the original naughts and crosses piece for this composition albeit the composition was heavily simplified for this piece of work. Next I brought in the explosion of black to white tones but whereas it was previously quite small, for this piece the explosion was enlarged in order to begin consuming the entire piece and the composition behind it.
The days following when I first began this piece I wanted to continue layering the paint over and over the piece each time changing the tone and direction of the brush stroke. I kept changing my mind from the final brush strokes being of lighter tones or darker tones, in the end I decided that the darker tones worked better as I was trying to conceal the composition almost entirely. The paint I used for this piece was also mixed with pva glue which created a really nice effect after brushing over it several times were the paint would start to peel away and reveal the layers of paint underneath.
This is a piece of work I completed in my life class sessions, despite not being a part of the mark making project it still relates as it is using the same techniques just in a slightly more figurative manner, and this piece is the first were I introduced colour into my work and began to move away from black and white tones. My aim for this piece was for it to be abstract and I have achieved this by only focusing on certain lines in the figure and changing the orientation of the paper several times.
For this piece of work I wanted to move on from only using black and white tones to introducing colour as I had done with my life class work. I opted to use the same colour as with my life class and did the composition in blue then after watering down my paint and mixing a wide variety of tones of blue I overlayed on the composition with a collaboration of vertical and horizontal lines. As the paint had been watered down and the sheets of paper were up on the wall as I was working on this piece gravity also played a role and paint began to drip down my work onto the floor and onto the sheets of paper I had layed on the floor and these drips gave me an interesting composition as well.
For this piece of work I wanted to move on from only using black and white tones to introducing colour as I had done with my life class work. I opted to use the same colour as with my life class and did the composition in blue then after watering down my paint and mixing a wide variety of tones of blue I overlayed on the composition with a collaboration of vertical and horizontal lines. As the paint had been watered down and the sheets of paper were up on the wall as I was working on this piece gravity also played a role and paint began to drip down my work onto the floor and onto the sheets of paper I had layed on the floor and these drips gave me an interesting composition as well.
After the blue composition was finished I began to work back on top with it whilst the majority of the blue paint was still wet, the blue paint being wet wasn't crucial for the next stage of this piece but it enhanced the effect. I painted over the piece with black, white and various grey tones which like the blue was watered down. The paint would then drip down the page as the blue had done and down onto the paper below. The explosion that I was painting over the top became a wash and instead of being solidly over the top there was just a suggestion of an explosion. My favourite aspect of this piece is that when the explosion began to drip it also washed more of the blue paint down with it leaving hints of negative pictorial space throughout the composition. 
The paper on the floor was enhanced by the drips of greys and was left undisturbed until it had completely dried. This resulted in a range of interesting textures.
Sticking with the way I had been
working I began to create another piece similar to this style but with just a few adjustments made to it. I flipped the colour scheme I was working with and as I had done with my first explosion piece the composition was done in black, white and various grey tones as solid colours. Once this had all dried I began to work over the top with watered down greys in the horizontal and vertical lines I had done on my previous piece of work and I left these to drip down the page. Instead of working over this immediately with blue I waited for it to dry and then painted over it with solid tones of blue to work towards concealing the composition in the background. This worked really well, the majority of the composition was concealed by the blue explosion, however in spite of liking this piece I much preferred the one I did earlier. The drips of blue then with grey over the top also dripping down just gave the piece a far more interesting look to it and there was more going on with the main piece of work and the paper on the floor capturing the drips (the knock on effect as I have began to refer to it as).
After experimenting with blue and black it was clear to me the I could implement colour into my work and the piece would work successfully. For my full coloured piece I wanted to something a little bit different and see how that would work out for me. So far all my explosion pieces consisted of one explosion consuming the majority of the page, for this piece I decided that I would have multiple explosions of colour concealing a black and white composition and enveloping virtually all of the page. I started off with painting the composition on the background but kept it quite basic for the most part as I was going to be over painting it with layers and layers of different colours. As soon as I had the composition down on the page I began analyzing it looking to see if there were any specific points that i could start the explosions of colour from. Already this process was differing from my past pieces of work as the explosion had always been centered but now I had to look and locate suitable places to work from. From looking at the composition I decided that instead of the explosions just emanating from random points on the page I would start them off from points of contact of two or more lines that existed in the composition, each varying in their location on the page. I began mixing paints together not making any conscious decision on what colour would be applied first and where it would be applied. I approached the piece in this way because it was meant to be painted in a hectic manner much like an explosion and I didn't want to ruin this by putting in too much thought to each brush stroke and what colour I was going to use, I just mixed then applied over and over layering up the colours from each of the three points I had allocated as the source of my explosions. This piece worked very successfully, the chaos of an explosion has been captured in this piece and can be seen in both the application of paint and just by looking at the finished outcome.
Since I have been focusing on explosions of colour and black & white in my work my pieces have all had a chaotic feel to them, for this piece of work I wanted to flip this on its head and focus on the calm as you can't have chaos without calm and vice versa. Without one you couldn't have a concept of the other and I wanted to show this with my work. So far I had focused on chaos but for my work to truly represent chaos then I need to incorporate an element of calm. I simplified the composition even more and whereas in my earlier work I had used both naughts and crosses as my marks I chose to only use naughts for this piece. After first completing the basic composition I wasn't entirely happy with how it had turned out, it didn't flow with my work with the rest of my work by having no chaotic element whatsoever. The calm had always been present in my work in the composition that I had used but it was always concealed, to get this piece to flow more with what I was doing I worked into the background of the piece and introduced some softer calmer colours but in a swirling motion, very much like an oncoming storm. The use of calm colours throughout this piece symbolizes the calm before the storm.
Thanks to my 'calm before the storm' piece I had a new direction in which to take my piece of work, and I moved away from the explosion and started creating a storm. I wanted the main focus to be chaotic but still have an element of calm and tranquility so I started off by removing a circle from the centre of the page and painting this green to represent the calm or my own personal inner peace. I then painted the rest in tones of a red-orange, red and a red-purple. My brush strokes consisted of fast circular motions as I wanted to recreate the swirling motion of a storm and for it to look as though you were staring into the eye of the storm when standing in front of it. I painted the part closest to the circle in the red-orange and as I moved away from the centre I began to introdcue a solid red colour. As I moved further and further away I started to introduce small hints of blue to darken the red and bring it closer to a shade of purple but not making it purple. I kept over painting and layering paint on top of each other in the same swirling motion to add break up the changes in so it wasn't a direct change from one tone to the other and the tone transitioned smoothly. This piece worked really well and simulated the effects I was trying to create within it.
My eye of the storm piece had worked really well so I decided that I would take this further as opposed to returning to focusing on the explosion. I wanted to adapt my piece and change it from being rectangular, my tutor directed me to an artist called Elizabeth Murray who worked by attaching several sheets of paper together or layering sheets over each other to work on, I really like looking at her work, the compositions were always interesting and knowing that the majority of it was done on paper helped to spur me along with my pieces. I attached several sheets of paper together, cut out a circle in the middle and then repeated the same painting process that I had done before. As the circle I had cut out was bigger than the paper I ended up with two pieces as opposed to one, but this is what I wanted to happen as I wanted to experiment with hanging several pieces and creating a 2 dimensional storm but consisted of several layers going further back and changing in tone to try and simulate looking up through a tornado. When experimenting with hanging these pieces they didn't remain flat which at first I was disappointed with but when stepping back and looking at the piece from a perspective slightly further away it captured the image of tornado in a more realistic way than if it was hung flat.
Unfortunately getting the pieces to remain in a certain shape or at least form in a certain proved to be difficult due to the flimsyness of the paper. I didn't want to change the medium of the paper as it was the flimsyness of it that really brought this idea of the storm across. When looking at trees and houses, they are strong structures that can hold their own against almost anything, but when a storm hits they can be uprooted and ruined (albeit in a very strong storm) and are as fragile in these conditions as a sheet of paper. Even though it defeated the object of what I was trying to acvhieve I experimented with reinforcing the paper with plaster cloth so then I would have control over the shape it formed and it would hold the shape successfully. After creating a small sample using a coffee cup as a mould I noticed that it worked quite well, and so decided to go with it for my piece. I began with one piece of paper and used the bin to get the shape as it was the only thing big enough and even then it still wasn't quite big enough and resulted in me having to apply the plaster cloth in four stages. This used up a lot of my time as the plaster required to be left over night to completely dry and solidify. In total it took me four days to mould the paper into shape and after I had finished even more problems began to occur. Despite my best efforts to get the paper to mould the way I wanted the bin just wasn't big enough and after completion the paper curved around itself. I opted to leave this piece out of my exhibition piece as it hadn't worked how I wanted it to and to carry on with the technique would have wasted a lot of time and I wouldn't be ready in time for the exhibition.
I continued with painting the various layers for my piece, I started off with a smaller piece and painted it primarily in purple then layered over it with red-purple and added in hints and blue coming from the centre out and hints of red going from then outside in. For each layer I wanted the piece to get darker and darker in tone to simulate the tornado so that the further up you looked the darker it would be. Now I knew that plaster cloth wasn't going to work with my piece and I was trying to solve a way that I could hang my piece and still successfully communicate the image of a tornado. I pushed this to the back of my mind and moved my focus and to the actual pieces themselves.
Throughout the course of this project regardless of what I was painting I always set myself on the same two boards, due to the chaos and hectic-ness of my painting style the boards themselves became covered in paint but only the negative spacing of the paper that I had been painting on. These negative impressions on the wall gave a very interesting composition in itself. After seeing this I put paper on the boards so that I could capture the negative shapes of each layer of my storm piece.
Now with my piece of paper up to capture all the negative space from the various layers of my storm I began painting the front of the next layer up, again primarily purple but moving closer to blue and away from red virtually entirely. I layered up a few tones of purple in the piece darkening them each time and working from the centre out, much like the pieces I had painted before I didn't want the tone to change directly from one hue to another I wanted them all to blend together and this was easily achievable. It worked really well with me painting in a circular motion as I could add in highlights of colour where I pleased.
As a group we wrote a proposal to the head of school asking if we could put up an exhibition on the 18th November, which was also the college open evening so this was a great opportunity for us to have people to come and see our work and it also showed off the college to people coming for the open evening as it showed what us as students here are capable of and what we have been able to achieve through studying here. After writing the proposal and being given the go ahead for the exhibition as a group we gathered up all our work be it a final piece for exhibiting or work that we had completed throughout the duration of the mark making project. We independently went through the work and selected pieces that we believed were good enough to exhibit and after doing so had some feedback and input from our tutor on what he believed we should do.
I was still working on my final outcome for the exhibition finishing off the layers of the storm that I wanted to incorporate in my piece. I still hadn't thought of a way in which I could hang the pieces successfully and create the effect I was going for. After having a discussion about my outcome with my tutor, because I adamantly wanted to include it in the exhibition having spent the past week working so hard on it and we came up with a solution. Instead of hanging different pieces of each layer and molding them to curve round we agreed on keeping the pieces flat and hanging them 2 dimensional. We decided to take the paper that had captured all the negative spacing of the pieces and put this up on the boards flat and to then have two pieces of wood running along the top to hang the pieces off. The two purple layers were hung on the piece of wood closest to the back boards as these were intended to be further back and I still wanted to keep my piece layered like with my original vision. Hanging from the wood in front of this we placed the red-purple layer and then stapled onto the boards my original 'eye of the storm' piece as this is a very strong piece and it worked really well with the rest of my work. Now to see the work you had walk up close to it and look through the holes that had been cut out of each piece and only revealing a small section of the back wall.
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