Terrible photography aside, a collection of twenty small square paintings each showing a different image. Blue skies dominate the collection, with a handful of bright reds, oranges, and industrial browns scattered throughout.
The images start somewhere in the abstract, places definitely, but also definitely lifeless. As we travel to the right, we pass between two guardians at a gate, before crossing mountains into verdant greenery. We end somewhere close to where we began — modernity with its conveniences and somehow also inhospitable.
I’ve been thinking a lot about migration, and people seeing Canada as some sort of promised land. A place with so much empty that they can send their “problem” populations to us. Or a place to go to because it is some sort of utopia in comparison to where they are now. I think this has entered these paintings and the arrangements. From my initial selection along a theme of ‘here and there’, through to the narratives that formed as I was arranging the paintings in different ways, everything became about travel and searching.
Table of Contents
Reflection
Intention matters
Looking at the final works, I like most of them for what they are, but as a collection they are incoherent. Instead of trawling my library for images I liked, I should have gone in with the theme in mind and made sure every selection worked with the whole — not just on their own. In the absence of that forethought, my final arrangements and narrative are rather forced and dissatisfying.
I think I was hoping that coherence would form in the process of making — and certainly, it did a smaller scale — but definitely not on the whole. If I were to try that same method again, I’d need to make many many more paintings so that I could remove the ones that didn’t fit the final piece.
Comfort Zone
I really enjoy working with the human figure. So for this assignment, I chose to minimize my opportunity to do so. I really want to extend my range so that I can do more things, and share more stories. I can’t do that if I don’t paint more things than just people.
There are some moments in the landscapes I created that I like, and I think that also came about from the choice of medium. In particular in images 2, and 6 (see below), there are interesting shapes created in the landscape features caused by the acrylic paint’s partial drying, and remixing.
Pacing
Pacing is important. I did a significant number of these small works over the course of a very long afternoon and evening. I did a disservice to myself: I can see where my energy levels and creativity dipped. It is interesting how I can focus for five, six or seven hours when working on a single painting but the constant start/stop of doing these little paintings was extremely draining.
I have quickly learned that there is an energy cost to start any given work and to get past the middle state where it looks plain ugly. Doing that a dozen times in a row is very exhausting.
Choice of Medium
In the exercises I enjoyed a few things about acrylic:
- The ease of layering, and the play of opacity/transparency in that layering. I didn’t have to be concerned that an earlier layer would re-activate and turn everything to mud, but I could also get interesting visual effects with thin layers letting the underlying show through.
- Physical texture became possible, by layering thick paint. In this assignment this impast allowed me to wash very thin paint back over the impasto to highlight or darken these three-dimensional features. It was fascinating to see what I could do.
Final Images
In no particular order. Hover over to zoom in.
Not all of these are particularly successful, and I can definitely see which ones fell victim to being the last ones painted in any given session.
My favourites
A few narratives I see in the collection
Other arrangements
I found it hard to break from the grid. Also, when I saw a relationship between two images it became quite difficult for me to separate them — like they wanted to be shown together. The Guardians is one such example.
Inspirations
Part of this assignment relates to how the final images are arranged. During the work, I visited galleries and took note of how various works were presented.
I particularly like the image-cloud presentation in Aïda Vosoughi’s Displaced Landscapes II, and how it occupies space. Through its spatial arrangement and the mirrors on the ground, there are many ways to look at the paintings.
Tracey Moffatt’s Plantation creates pairs and clusters which suggest relationships and narrative. This appeals to me as well.
Ultimately I didn’t have the materials to try creating a similar effect to Vosoughi’s cloud of paintings, but it is something I will keep in mind.
In my test arrangements, however, I found myself collecting images into short “narratives”, much like the diptych’s I saw in Moffatt’s piece.
Reference Images
I chose imagery that would push me towards landscapes, and abstraction. I wanted some images that would act as ‘rest’ or pauses in the overall collection. I added a couple images of human forms, to anchor the ability to create narrative.
Most of these images were sent to me by friends and colleagues, at my request, based on their interpretation of the theme ‘here and there’.
Process
Prep
- Using my computer to look at small thumbnails of all chosen images so that I can see the general colour schemes across the images.
- Then, following advice from a then-tutor in a prior unit, I’m going to pre-paint my surfaces using acrylic orange, green, red, black or white. The colours were chosen based on colours in my chosen imagery
- I’ll use kitchen sponges to create the underpainting, so it isn’t uniform.
- I know most of this prep work will get covered.
Thumbnails and Planning
To help ground me in the composition and cropping, I did small thumbnails of the collection and in graphite I planned some of the images.
