Photography mini project

Alongside my main practise and preoccupation with painting, I delved into a series of mini projects throughout the academic year that allowed me to explore using materials and mediums such as photography, sculpture and found object art. One of the projects was to react to another student's work on the course by creating a 'responsive' piece of work that embodied an essence of both yours and theirs artistic style. I decided to take a series of photos that I could later warp, edit and overlay to produce an outcome that was subhuman and abstract in form. I used a variety of tools to achieve the finished result, this included overlaying, playing with the hue and saturation levels, adjusting the brightness and contrast, overlaying with other images, distorting the dimensions and so forth. I really like the edits I made as they remind me of Francis Bacon's twisted and contorted portrait paintings and they inspire me to try painting them to further enhance my experience with painting faces and bodies in a surreal style.

 In addition to this, I wanted to make sure the edits I made were reminiscent of the paint pours I create when using acrylic paint, and I think the bright blending colours and flowing lines mirror the appearance of these quite nicely. Creating these edits digitally also served as a great exercise in giving me inspiration for mixing colour combinations with my paintings for the future. It's unbelievably quick and easy to edit your colour choices when done digitally, you can reverse and change a colour within seconds at the click of a finger, which isn't doable with mixing acrylic paints. Your colour choices with paint are a lot more detrimental to your time and finances, therefore you feel a pressure to get it right first time, for fear of waste. Making edits such as these allow you to play around with certain colour combinations before committing to paint/ canvas, should you end up not liking the appearance of them. 

 I would ultimately like to incorporate these photos into some future works when working with collage. I'd love to take some more photos, perhaps of the entire body in the nude, and follow the same editing techniques using overlay, warp, saturation etc to create some abstract nude edits to use in otherworldly narrative scenes on paper.

 

Paint pours created using different techniques

 

Pour art reflections

With the new paint pours I created this term, I specifically played around with the composition  of the paint on the canvas. I found it interesting to manipulate the direction in which I poured the mixture/ pigment onto the surface of the canvas.

I also tried to exit my comfort zone with my colour choices. I usually tend to create work using a selection of colours that I don’t sway from and I think this can lead to incredibly visually samey and limiting work that leaves you in a creative and aesthetic pigeonhole. I incorporated colours that I’d typically deem as unattractive to switch up the appearance of my work and challenge my established ways of working. 

Next time, I will put more time and effort into how I prep the backgrounds of my pours, as I think a flat singular colour doesn’t harbour enough depth to make the painting captivating visually. To achieve this, I’ll practice painting gradient backgrounds with a variety of colour blends alongside painting different shapes and textures into the background before applying the pour. 

Next, alongside spending more time and adding more detail to the backgrounds of the pours, I also plan to create paint pours on much larger surfaces, alongside figurative painted elements (such as my thumbnail for Gehenna). These works were primarily made using a static pour technique, rather than spinning the pours on my painting wheel. I think the pours definitely look more interesting, vivid and complex after being spun on the wheel, so this is also a change I will incorporate into my future paintings.