Fine Art - Attempts At Experimentation

The aim for the day was to not think too much - just to do. To remain loose and just experiment with shapes, space and materials, not to associate meaning to begin with.

To start with we had to take a few objects that we could find and then do anything with them on the paper, like project their shapes, draw around them, cut their shapes out of paper, sketch them etc.

Attempt 1:

My starting objects were a pair of scissors, a memory stick and earphones, later expanding to antlers and a phone case.

I enjoyed mixing the materials like paint, coloured paper, graphite and pastel together along with images of the same object at different sizes as well as overlapping them. We had to make the composition look good, which can sometimes be hard when you're trying to be loose, but just painting without having to think was fun. Perhaps this attempt was a bit bright though and now that I look at it again, I maybe was too focused on not making it look too crowded or messy and consequently it looks a bit empty.

Attempt 2:

I think Attempt 2 looks a lot better though it was still using the same process. To begin with I couldn't think of what to do to make it look interesting and I just had the shells at the bottom of the page and the charcoal splodges in the top corner (which were drawings from around a rock, though you can't tell), but they just looked messy. I had wanted to do a pastel rubbing from the shell to get the texture of the surface, like you do with trees, but the paper was too thick. Filling the space with expanses of coloured paper and newspaper and working on top of these though worked well. I especially liked doing the tracings of hands, lined with paint. Overall, I think keeping the shapes simple and quite clean and combining them with a background worked the best.

In between attempt 1 and 2 we looked at a slideshow of different works by different artists, in particular a few pieces of Michael Craig-Martin's work:

Reading (With Globe), Michael Craig-Martin, 1980, tape on wall

Knowing, Michael Craig-Martin, 1996, acrylic paint on canvas

 Reading (With Globe) from http://www.artcornwall.org. Knowing from http://www.tate.org.uk


 I really liked his bold use of block colour and line, so I had this in mind when starting Attempt 2, which resulted in the lined hand paintings.

Lyric Inspired Work

 After the two pure experimentation pieces, we moved on to combining the loose nature of them with the metaphor in the lyric that we had chosen previously (White Winter Hymnal -Fleet Foxes). Ideally, we had to stay with the same materials and techniques that we used for the two attempts, but convey the metaphor, staying away from being too literal.

This is my attempt so far:

 It's unfinished at this point, but I wanted to have a strong emphasis on colour and to keep it quite simple. The actual lyrics reminded me initially of a Russian battle scene, of walking through the snow, the red of the government and conflict.

"I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied 'round their throats
to keep their little heads
from fallin' in the snow
And I turned 'round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime." 

Lyrics from http://www.lyrics007.com
 
But on re-reading the lyrics I think they might be about trying to maintain a purity (snow), of not letting others influence you into temptation and demise (red), that demise may come from looking back into the past as well and letting this affect you (turned round...you would fall).

The imagery is quite cold, so I wanted to maintain that coldness along with the emphasis on white and red. The figures (as represented by keys perhaps as they formed a good stencil previously and show individuality) still need to be added in, but will be boxed in by colour, forced to walk a straight line else be influenced by the hands. The hand prints worked well on Attempt 2, and show meddling also.

After the Christoph Zellweger lecture, I was conscious of creating clear progress from one piece to the next, so I tried to incorporate some of the different elements of Attempt 1 and 2, like the hand prints and newspaper background, while relating the piece to the lyrics.

Hopefully the final part of adding the key traces at different sizes won't over complicate the piece and make it look too busy.