17 February 2019
Week Three
Following on from last week’s composing smaller paintings to build larger images, I attempted to paint bigger paintings inspired by these groupings. I didn’t make many before I lost heart. It wasn’t in the spirit of the particular painting process, it was too illustrative. I instead used these to influence the painting process, rather than to copy what already existed. I looked at how the grouped paintings alluded to larger gestural marks which cut across the frame.
I had been screen printing for only a week now, having not done it before this term. I was working out ways of bringing my painting and printmaking together somehow. I was intrigued by the way you don’t know how the screen stencil has printed until the screen is lifted up. Subconsciously this came into my painting work. I was playing around with monotype-like printing through the silk screen when cleaning it when changing the colour of the ink. I pressed the ink through the screen with a wet rag and what developed was a monotype also with the screen stencil there.
Following my tutorial last week where we discussed aspects of composition and layout, I experimented with working on unconventional shaped surfaces. I had primed a large sheet of paper and I tore it up at random to leave me with strange shapes of all sizes. My starting point was to paint landscapes without thinking too much about the intersection of a rectangle. More fluid and free was my painting that I shrieked with joy! This freeing exercise brought me back to when I first painted as a child and had no inner critique. I worked prolifically and created Warshak-like or ink blot test images. I could see multiple things in each image depending on how I looked at them and found that other people also saw different things. There were many possibilities here.
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