Well, it looks like I'd have to spend money to actually post images here, so no dice on that front. However, this week I have two critiques coming up, one for each class. We'll be doing crits in sculpture tomorrow and painting on wednesday. So, this would be an opportune time to really bust some ass and finish some problematic areas and knock some people on their ass. That's not exactly what's happening yet.
Beginning with painting, I had a visit from a former drawing prof, Richard Jordan last week. He was looking at my shaped panels and said that he thought they weren't really finished as single units (which they aren't - I'm still painting on all of them) and thought instead that they were parts of a larger whole somehow. The word he kept returning to was "shards," as if the strange angles and outlines of the panels reminded him of broken glass or pottery. Now, as it happens, this is an idea that had occurred to me before. In fact, at the start of the semester I floated the idea of stacking the individual paintings a few inches apart in a box of some kind, making them units of a diorama or seomething of that nature. The reason for this ,of course, is because I'm interested in using the shapes of the panels as a way to activate the viewers awareness of the space around the paintings. I have also considered (as I think I mentioned in a previous entry) hanging the panels in such a way that they would seem to 'float' a few inches or maybe even as much as a foot away from the wall behind them, thus approaching a kind of sculptural effect. These paintings aren't paintings of anything in particular, after all. Purely abstract paintings really can't be that, so they become objects in and of themselves rather than a depiction of something, as representational art is. So anyway, Jordan's recommendation was to try assembling them in a three-dimensional way to push their objecthood that much more.
However, that was about 12 hours of painting ago, and two of them have changed their appearance since then, one of them very dramatically. The painting in question is cut with four branching, sinuous shapes that could almost be considered lines created in negative. The masking of the wood and gesso had each been done in a similar character, although not imitating the cut shapes exactly. My initial thought for this painting was to create something like a lattice of overlapping veins or branches or river systems (this was begun before I'd seen the film Rivers and Tides , by the way, although the shapes Andy Goldsworthy repeats in many of his works have a similar appraearance.) Anyway, after the taping and gessoing and retaping, I put a field of slate-gray (but irregularly mixed) paint on the surface with a palatte knife, resulting in a rough, highly textured, uneven surface with a pretty consistent color value broken up by yellow highlights near the center. On top of this, I began painting branches or veins or what have you encroaching on the center of the palate from the sides. This happened in various colors, one color per layer of branching forms. Each layer had about 3-5 different forms on it. When Jordan saw this painting last week, it had three layers of forms on it, two in different shades of green and one in black. Today, however, I mixed a sort of pinkish brownish orangish color that might conceivably be described as flesh or peach and began applying it at the center instead of the edge. Also, I varied the thickness of the lins a great deal more than I had on previous layers. Bradley Peterson (who teaches this painting class) thought that it began to add an element of space and light to the painting. I'm not sure I approve of that, but I do think it looks a lot better.
Okay, more later.
Beginning with painting, I had a visit from a former drawing prof, Richard Jordan last week. He was looking at my shaped panels and said that he thought they weren't really finished as single units (which they aren't - I'm still painting on all of them) and thought instead that they were parts of a larger whole somehow. The word he kept returning to was "shards," as if the strange angles and outlines of the panels reminded him of broken glass or pottery. Now, as it happens, this is an idea that had occurred to me before. In fact, at the start of the semester I floated the idea of stacking the individual paintings a few inches apart in a box of some kind, making them units of a diorama or seomething of that nature. The reason for this ,of course, is because I'm interested in using the shapes of the panels as a way to activate the viewers awareness of the space around the paintings. I have also considered (as I think I mentioned in a previous entry) hanging the panels in such a way that they would seem to 'float' a few inches or maybe even as much as a foot away from the wall behind them, thus approaching a kind of sculptural effect. These paintings aren't paintings of anything in particular, after all. Purely abstract paintings really can't be that, so they become objects in and of themselves rather than a depiction of something, as representational art is. So anyway, Jordan's recommendation was to try assembling them in a three-dimensional way to push their objecthood that much more.
However, that was about 12 hours of painting ago, and two of them have changed their appearance since then, one of them very dramatically. The painting in question is cut with four branching, sinuous shapes that could almost be considered lines created in negative. The masking of the wood and gesso had each been done in a similar character, although not imitating the cut shapes exactly. My initial thought for this painting was to create something like a lattice of overlapping veins or branches or river systems (this was begun before I'd seen the film Rivers and Tides , by the way, although the shapes Andy Goldsworthy repeats in many of his works have a similar appraearance.) Anyway, after the taping and gessoing and retaping, I put a field of slate-gray (but irregularly mixed) paint on the surface with a palatte knife, resulting in a rough, highly textured, uneven surface with a pretty consistent color value broken up by yellow highlights near the center. On top of this, I began painting branches or veins or what have you encroaching on the center of the palate from the sides. This happened in various colors, one color per layer of branching forms. Each layer had about 3-5 different forms on it. When Jordan saw this painting last week, it had three layers of forms on it, two in different shades of green and one in black. Today, however, I mixed a sort of pinkish brownish orangish color that might conceivably be described as flesh or peach and began applying it at the center instead of the edge. Also, I varied the thickness of the lins a great deal more than I had on previous layers. Bradley Peterson (who teaches this painting class) thought that it began to add an element of space and light to the painting. I'm not sure I approve of that, but I do think it looks a lot better.
Okay, more later.
posted by Austin at 1:12 PM
1 Comments:
How about photobucket?
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