Exercise 3.6 •A Gathering of Ideas

Aim
For your final exercise in this project, you will first of all look through all the work you have produced so far. What subject matter did you find the most interesting and challenging - and at this stage, what would you like to develop further?
Working with still life, landscape or interiors, this is your opportunity to dig a little deeper, with subject matter and with materials. But remember you are still at the gathering stage, so exploring ideas and ways of interpreting a subject, rather than trying to make highly finished work. Allow yourself to take experimental risks along the way.
For landscape studies you can refer to earlier sketches and your own photographs. If you decide to work with interiors or still life you can work from life.
Method
Make some very quick preliminary studies in your sketchbook to experiment with different compositions.
Working with your choice of media and on any scale, make a series of between 4 - 8 studies. You might decide to work relatively quickly on one or two pieces - perhaps 20 - 30 mins, keeping the mark making fluid and gestural. Other studies might take longer and have a little more detail and definition in places - vary your approach.
You are looking at different ways of working with the same subject, but that doesn’t have to mean the same arrangement of forms e.g. if you choose landscape each of your compositions might have very different elements. Or if you are working with still life you can describe different objects.

Initial reflections on subject matter

Reviewing my work, I feel working with still life, landscape or interiors all have potential for different reasons. I struggled with but ultimately enjoyed working on all of them! Trying to get a signal from the noise, and also reviewing my Foundation work, l think that I’m interested in the theme of childhood, growing up, parenting. The sketches I felt most drawn to were the sketches from the playground. I enjoyed drawing the structures in the park as well as the bright colours. I also enjoy reflecting about the place as a place where things come and go, not unlike Sarah Pickstone’s writers series, I see the playground as a space where kids and parents grow older, a space that is overlooked. I find the idea of a playground is rich. I always found kids parks to be an oddity of modern life. It’s structured, enclosed fun for kids. But it full of rules and constraints as well.

Sketches and studies

Composition sketches and quick studies

I am running out of time for making more work before the tutorial and I want to (need to!) keep moving on so I focused on the photograph of my daughter skating in the playground. I remembered the frustration I felt when not getting the facial expression in my first study. So instead of using pencils, I used my phone and created a black and white version of the original image.

Quick Studies

As I enjoyed the tracing for my image folder, I decided to use charcoal to transfer the outline of my image on paper. It was not “quick” but it helped me focus on the detailed shapes and lines I had wanted to capture in the first place.

Developped studies

For the developed study, I decided to go granular and use an ink pen to trace the lines I had transferred. I used the blown up face crop to help me focus on the shapes of the shadows, and I am quite pleased with the result! It reminds me of a classical drawing! This is not a fully developed study. I am stopping here partly because of time and partly because I feel I have done so much work so far, I need a conversation to take it further.

Reflections

There are many paths I could follow from here, including using watercolours for the grass, using cutouts and the Art Graf chalks for the texture of the ground. I’m also wondering about what to do with the edges (leave them as they are, expand them without reference?), I’m wondering whether to use different type of inking (a brush pen?) for the darkest areas. Finally, I’m wondering how I could bring back some of the loose quality of my first study which I did without “scaffolds”.

More generally, I’m wondering where to “push” next. I’m still scattered, also still exploring abstract art making on the side. I look forward to having an informed discussion on my work so far and a shared reflection with my tutor to help me clarify the path ahead.

Above is a slideshow of “extra-curricular work” I have done while working on Project 3…

Progress update…