The Journey...Drawing Project

Walking, looking, finding the things we don't normally see as we wander past. 

The un-obvious suddenly becomes something to be seen and recorded. Everyday surfaces come to life with colour and texture and as photographers we can take these gifts and enhance them to become pieces of art in their own right, concentrating on their abstract qualities

A simple piece of fence in a deserted farm yard offers so many possibilities and angles to be explored...

'Enlightened Ambush'...Exhibition by the year 6 students.

The two artists that really stood out for me were the brilliant installation pieces of Jennifer Kahlo and the balanced portraits of irene Louca. 

Kahlo's pieces, constructed with metal objects, string and paper were full of questions and structure. I couldn't find a statement so didn't know what they were about but it didn't matter. The pieces flowed around the room like a mini exhibition all of their own and each individual piece was very strong and really well put together and the photos don't do them justice.

 

The cotton lines define her works, creating 3D drawings inside the space, not restricted by the boundaries of the paper. The lines are made to restrict the paper as opposed to the paper restricting the lines. I really like her work and the way its different from anything else I'm seeing at Demont. 

Irene Louca gave us a look at her attention grabbing face paintings. The one I really liked was the female close up. The dark eye stares back at you making you stare back at it, holding your gaze until you explore the rest of the deeply painted, scratched and rubbed face, then return to the eye, still there  watching your every move. The face is full of emotion but its hard to tell which emotion. She looks as though she might be just about to cry, or kiss you, or does the complete blackness of the eye suggest death in some way? Either way its a great painting and the smudging separates it from being a staright-forward portrait image. 

Her use of dark backgrounds really fixes the picture and Again, I see a lot of portraiture at Demont but this painting, due to its depth and quality of production, is one of my faves so far. 

Print...experimental prints

I like the idea of controlling a process but not an outcome. 

Paint can be applied to a surface in a controlled way but tilt, move, shake or screw up the paper and the outcome is uncontrollable. 

Paper was placed at the bottom of a staircase then paint filled balls of paper were dropped from the top floor, at the point of impact an uncontrolled image was instantly produced. 

Paint was dripped onto dark paper which was tilted and moved in a controlled way but the exact path, spread and puddling of the liquid is beyond control. This final painting resembles the outline of a roses petals, again something that can be planted and pruned with some level of control but the shape of each petal can never actually be controlled. 

I like these paintings as experimental prints but need to concentrate on a process and make something more 'real' in relation to my own work.

AA2A Artist visit Employability week 2013.

Alex Brady gave a very inspirational talk about her life and journey as a professional artist. Showing works and explaining her process' she enforced the idea that if you work at something you can achieve whatever you want.
Her lino cut prints inspired by the Bob Dylan song 'Desolation Road' showed what is involved in producing and selling a self published book. Her detailed prints were full of craftsmanship (or craftswomanship?) and she highlighted the use of craft fairs and zines.

leila Houston pointed out a very informative list of leicestershire galleries and workspaces in the area and her tips on staying an artist once we leave uni was great to hear as she delivered it with a lot of passion. She also pushed the theory of working hard to achieve our goals. Leila's short films using noises and images were very impressive and I intend to research them in the future.

Experimental drawings for the Journey project.

Kids see everything as an adventure, mystery or exploration.
Every colour is brighter. Noises are louder. Dark sheds and barns are places that need to be explored, sometimes nervously as the mind races with ideas of what might be inside.
I tried to capture this through the brightness of the 'sharpie' pens and the style I drew in and I wanted the images to have an innocence all of their own.
The messiness, overgrown look and movement in the fields, sheds and outbuildings comes across through the scribbled lines and soft edges.
I like the idea of invoking a nostalgic feeling through the drawings and the idea of a story or event. Each picture is A2 in size and I think the next step might be to make them longer, maybe 3 pieces of A2 together in a panoramic landscape?

Landscape images made as research for my 'Journey' project.

landscape....
Naturally we have an instinct to stare at a beautiful landscape, fixed before us, stationary,
appearing motionless.
But nothing is actually still.
The earth moves. Plants grow. minuscule creatures roam. Rain falls.
Skies form, float and transform with colour and contrast.
Water moves, dances and escapes our view, Gradually pushing forward to the next place.
Light comes and goes. brightens, darkens. Changing every second.
Movement fills the scene. Sometimes obvious, sometimes almost invisible. But always there.
Landscape becomes constant movement.

I made these images to show the life or movement in seemingly stationary landscapes. The abstract quality, painterly effect and depth of shade, tone and colour makes them come alive and the blur stretches every element and shape to its extreme. Buildings merge with skies, plants become a part of the road and water becomes just a colour and pattern dispersed by the process involved.

Vist from Stuart Cumberland

Stuart Cumberland presented us with a selection of his paintings and photographs along with an insightful, eye opening and sometimes bizarre talk about his life and his works. ("Firemen become firemen because as children they like to piss on things")
A Self confessed solitary artist with a love of bums, human bodily fluid and psychoanalysing, his paintings are simple, uncomplicated abstracts full of the before mentioned bums, tits and other body parts. You wouldn't realise this though without being informed as each canvas only seems to hold a set of different forms and shapes, colours and patterns.
He chooses to use dull cheap paints in a bid to make the paintings non-impressive - Take them as you find them. He does this to invoke a feeling of us not knowing what they are, what they mean or why he painted them and he paints in a way that says 'why be bothered what they are, just look at them'.

'cmyk 300.3' stuart cumberland

Once informed of the build up of his images we can start to see these things in each piece. The above painting, produced with cheap emotionless colours, (faded red, straight black and layered white) has bum holes (pointed out by the artist during his talk) and what I guess might be suggestions of bums, tits, hands and 4 or 5 heads. 

Flashes of Keith Haring and Lichtenstein can be seen in these stencilled and painted images and the centre square is left stripped back or removed to take the layered painting back to its simplest form, almost blank, deconstructing or maybe breaking down the image. This idea came across a lot from the artist. He explained in a way that made me feel his work is all about the effort involved and the relief when he completes a work, although when asked how he knows a work is complete he stated "Er..I don't really, they just sort of look done". 

Cumberland came across with the attitude of 'If you don't like it, don't look at it'. 

'cmy 300 240m' stuart cumberland

The paintings struggle to fit together on one canvas. Shapes battle for the space or try to escape each other and they look to me like a mash up of several paintings chucked onto the canvas. 

They have great strength as abstract, unexplained forms but fail to convey any message or narrative but I don't think he's trying to do this anyway, he just paints them. 

 "I love the messiness of my studio where I can splash and splosh paint everywhere with no worries, almost like the wet rooms older people have in their houses" an idea that definitely spills over into his work. This attitude continues through the artists whole life highlighted by several facts - Kicked out by his wife for going to Rome, house sitting friends houses because he couldn't be bothered to find his own place, sleeping in his studio due to having nowhere to live and when asked by a major gallery to produce a series of paintings on a certain theme for them to sell he said "Fuck off, I'll paint what I like". Thus losing a major show and a big pay day which he admitted was a 'major mistake in his life'. 

The artist talked about the influence of freud's Fort/Da theory where a child threw a toy away from himself then pulled it back, delighted he could get back what he'd lost. Cumberland explained this as a sort of 'loss and return' idea manifesting itself onto some of his canvas', Removing some of the paint from the centres of each image, returning the canvas back to its original state. 

Cumberland became an artist simply because he didn't want a real 9-5 job and admits thinking painting is now a lost art and a posh luxury to be enjoyed by the rich. 

"Painting is dead" he states but I remember reading somewhere the same was said after the Cistene chapel had been finished. 

Maybe its just his paintings that are dead?

The artworks? from his Rome trip left me wondering what was going on in his head. Travelling Rome and its villages for 6 months, he drank water at the thousands of free water fountains and let the water work its way through his body, leaving no trace of him ever being there. 

Nice work if you can get it, But where is the art? There is no record of the event jus a few poorly taken snap shots of the fountains.

Even if he won't admit it I think Cumberland's paintings are as deep and complex as the artist himself, full of contradiction, confusion, attitude, problems and questions. The finished pieces are a reaction to the process of applying the paint, light on emotion but heavy on humour. 

"The stencilled, painted surface signifies a wet, dripping painted line, rather than actually being one"

'Painted circle painting' stuart cumberland