Monday 10 January 2011

First day back in the attic

Just begun work for the exhibition next month at Venue Cymru in Llandudno. I have roughly four weeks to produce pieces and getting back into the attic was hard! Now that I have five canvasses on the go things are feeling a bit more fluid. I have a loose theme or really a sense of the direction and palette these next pieces are going to take. In my mind I am seeing water, rain and flowers. I have set out to work quickly, which is the best way for me since then I don't get precious and the work remains animated and happy. Too much thought always leads to leaden results in my experience.

That said, I am keen to work using a more layered approach in some of the painting. Which means some patience on my part waiting for paint to dry before working on the top of previous marks.....this can be a loooong time when the previous layer is very liquid! I am armed with a hairdryer!!

I am also planning on establishing contrasts not only in the colour palette, form and line, but by adjusting the tempo of the application - I am already seeing the later stages of the pieces forming now being more careful and "tighter" or even tender paint marks. I think it will be exciting to make myself slow right down towards the later stages as a contrast to the quick, gestural and pretty physical marks I usually end up making.

Two of the pieces I am doing are for a client and we have agreed that they both be made up of two canvasses fixed together to create a bigger piece. This approach came about as a result of development experiments cropping and juxtaposing smaller pieces from separate paint sketches together. The sharp division created an interruption in the overall composition that was both discordant and exciting - it set the rest of the tensions in the pieces off wonderfully. I am really excited about making more paintings for the exhibition in this way.

I have posted some quick pics of the attic this afternoon - i am really running out of space up here with the boxes and bikes with these bigger canvasses but it is so freeing to work on a bigger scale. there seems to be alot more room for accidents and changes in direction within the spaces.





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