Year 2 Painting Work

In the second year of my course at Canterbury Christ Church University we are encouraged to persue a mostly self directed practical project, in a medium of our choice.  I, personally, consider myself an abstract painter.  I am very interested in the relationship between colours and shapes, especially that of close up images.  My influences for this project include Jenny Saville, notably her photographic series Closed Contact.

Closed Contact by Jenny Saville:

As my images became more abstracted began to take influence from the Abstract Expressionists, especially Philip Guston.  He has influenced my use of colour and led me to choose a more limited palette which features a lot of grey.  Below are examples of some of his works.

North and Prospects by Philip Guston:

 

The lines and shapes of my work have been influenced by that of hands and skin, as well as root vegetables such as carrots and parsnips.  Some of the work started out as literal studies of both these things, but I have then gone on to use these ideas to create very expressive abstract images made up of ambiguous biomorphic shapes.  There is a mixture of oil paint, acrylic paint, watercolour and biro here.

 

 

Landscapes

My final project for year 1 at Canterbury Christchurch was a very open, self directed landscape project.  We were encouraged lead ourselves to go out into various landscapes and create a series of drawings.

I began by creating various charcoal drawings of Canterbury Cathedral, as well as one of some trees.  I focused on getting an accurate composition, but I also wanted them to appear gloomy, as charcoal lent itself to this feeling. 

 

 

I wanted some of my drawings to be quite illustrative so, for the following drawings, I used biro and some oil pastel.  The cathedral drawing was a continuous line drawing; I tried to draw it without taking the pen off the page.

 

 

 

After this I became more expressive.  Thinking back to my workshop on Experimental Ink Studies, I used various wooden tools to draw trees using acrylic paint.  I wanted to reflect the shapes of the tree using a piece of tree, as I felt this was appropriate.  I used a cotton bud for the dots of the blossom and leaves.  The final work is on a piece of cardboard, where I tore out the shape of the tree into the branches rather than drawing it.

 



 

Cezanne's Bathers Workshop

One workshop we did involved looking at two paintings, Bathers by Cezanne, and another one which I now can't remember, but it had a similar composition but depicted Jesus Christ surrounded by other biblical characters and some angels.  Below is Cezanne's work.

We also had a life model present, taking various poses from each of the paintings.   We worked in various media including charcoal and oil pastels.  The idea of the task was to learn to look at different elements and be able to work quickly to get down an idea of the composition.  Below are some of my outcomes.

Experimental Ink Studies

Continueing from the last post, I then took a workshop where we drew organic forms in ink.  The twist was that we weren't allowed to use a paint brush, but instead were asked to bring in tools that we could use instead, such as sticks, string or even a toothbrush.  We were encouraged to be very experimental with our drawings.  Below is a page of mark making I did using the different tools, and then some other studies.  For the first drawing of a rock I didn't actually see what I was drawing, as the rock was inside a plastic bag and I had to work out what to draw from feeling it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Experimental Charcoal Work

For two weeks we did an experimental workshop using charcoal.  The first task was the idea of 'taking a line for a walk'.  We had to look up at the architecture of our studio and create a continuous line drawing of what we saw.  We then had to rub out what we had done and move to a different space in the room and do the same thing on top of this.  Several other stages were added and I created an interesting monochrome drawing.

 

 

Then we had several other tasks using charcoal, the focus being on experimenting with mark making.  The following drawing is of a piece of fur, and I have tried to use various marks and techniques to replicate the different textures.

 

 

Next our lecturer set up a still life using various objects such as hessian and ropes.  We were asked to draw it and then rub out areas and work back into it whilst he periodically moved the objects around and we moved places to see it from a different angle.  This was interesting as we continued to explore different textures and thought about how we could refine and develop our work.

 

 

For the final task we went to the Sidney Cooper Gallery, which is joined to our painting studio at CCCU.  The current exhibition at the time featured works by Anish Kapoor.  We had to look at his work, and take studies of it from different angles, and then create a charcoal drawing based on these studies and the rest of the techniques that we had learnt in the workshop.  Below is a photo of his work The Chant of Blue and then my drawings based on one of the sculptures.

 

 

 

 

 





Transcription

With university we took a trip to the National Gallery in London and had to pick a painting to create a copy of.  This enabled us to learn about composition.  I chose The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Bernardo Strozzi.  Below is the original, then my transcription.

 

 

Life Drawing

Towards the beginning of the year we did several different life drawing sessions.  The first was a new style of life drawing to me; the model walked around the room, and our aim was to try and depict every point and position as a whole on the paper.  This was confusing at first but we linked it to works such as Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp (below).

 

Below is my outcome from the exercise, and a close up of the detail. 

 

 

 

The second life drawing task was similar to what I'd done before at a Royal Academy workshop, where the model stayed in a fixed position.  We looked at some drawings by Alberto Giacometti for inspiration (I can't find them now though!)  The idea was to draw the outlines of the different planes of the body which, on the last week, helped us to paint the planes.