Assignment Five:Reflections on Tutor Feedback

As always I have found that the video feedback sessions with my tutor Bryan Eccleshall both informative and stimulating. I am becoming increasingly aware of the need and my own desire to become more experimental with every medium at my disposal and concern myself more with the ways in which I create pictures rather than the success or otherwise of the finished result.

For example these monoprints were made from leftovers on a palette that I quickly manipulated and worked the back of the paper when taking the print. I find that I’m now beginning to embrace the randomness of making this way and enjoy the fact that I find myself somewhat distanced from the resulting image. It is almost a sense of having no responsibility for the outcome that is attractive.

The entire body of work that I’ve managed to make for Painting One is at least diverse but very inconsistent although this could be due to the use of the spectrum of media or the diversity of each exercise along the way.  I know my strength lies within oil and my weakness within watercolour but I have also enjoyed working with inks as can be seen in my little botanical studies and my five minute self portraits and I would like to practice more with ink drawing and watercolouring in combination with each other. In fact I want to practice much more and play around with as many different mediums as I possibly can in the hope that I can greatly increase my picture making vocabulary while having a great deal of fun trying things out at the same time.

I will not make any excuses for the fact that my written work has been cursory. I know that I’ve not been thorough or analytical enough. It is one of the hardest things to put into words such a visual feast that looking at paintings gives me and even harder to write about myself and my own work but I think I just need more practice and more work on formulating a mental template to allow me to approach this part of the learning process with more success.  I admit to deliberately not mentioning many of the exhibitions I’ve attended in my learning blog because I didn’t feel I would be able to do them justice with my poor critical analysis and the anxiety that is created by that pressure takes away from the pleasure of these visits. Both Bryan and my tutor for Visual Studies say that I write well which is very gratifying but probably meaningless if the content is not up to scratch.

I hope that by knowing my strengths and my awareness of my weaknesses will help me if I progress. I’ve always been a slow learner and easily forget as much as I remember so  it can often take time before I realise what an enormous amount I’ve learned and now I fully understand that the more you find out the more you know that you don’t know.

Chris Filtness 2019.

 

Ivon Hitchens:Space Through Colour

I was lucky enough to visit Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and see a major retrospective of the work of Ivon Hitchens. As the title of the exhibition suggests, my initial impression of many of these large panoramic pictures is of light and space and colour. I think this is achieved by his intelligent palette of colours and the way the paint is applied. The marks made with sweeping brush strokes in layers of colour draw the eye around these compositions and into areas that are merely suggested by the spaces left between each confident mark. Greens and yellows with a stroke of blue suggest a woodland pond and bold arcs of colour suggest the Sussex Downs. These marks, although practiced, have such immediacy and fresh energy that the viewer can not help feeling that they belong in these paintings now.

Flowers in a Window Ivon hitchins

I felt as if I had taken a long walk through woods and trees and open countryside and could feel the air entering my lungs and hear the sounds entering my brain, leaving me with a sense of perfect peace.

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Ivon Hitchens, Pallant House Gallery.

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Helene Schjerbeck:Royal Academy of Arts.

Helene Schjerbeck was a Finnish artist that I was unaware of until I visited this exhibition. The work spanned her lifetime from the late 19th century to just after the Second World War. The show included a room full of self portraits that show her development as a painter over this period as she shows herself to us early on in a pictorial way that becomes more and more psychological as she growers older. The likenesses become more forged with simpler marks as time goes by to almost abstraction and I could not help feeling that by looking at them I was prying into the soul of someone concerned with their own mortality.

I found great beauty in the way much of the work was painted and really like the way the layers have been rubbed down to bare canvas in some places that show an interest in Italian Renaissance Frescoes all the while retaining a Norther n European feeling of angst that one gets from work by Hammershoi or Munch. There is also a sense, despite the linear development of style, that much of her work is born out of fashion illustration. Some of the paintings from the twenties and thirties have the look of Art Deco advertising.

Portrait detail Helene Schjerfbeck

I think there is a lot to gain from looking at the way Schjerbeck has applied paint and by the way it has been removed and taken back. The relatively dry brush marks dragged over these surfaces bring a vibrancy to the work and allow the smallest highlight to lift a painting. An example can be seen in this detail above and the still life at the top of the page. The example below shows how she has managed to get the look of a 15th Century fresco by paring back layers of colour. I would also like to comment on the way she has portrayed hands, particularly in the paintings of her mother. They appear so simply painted and flat yet have an articulation and gestural quality despite the quiet way they are being held.

 

Helene Schjerbeck is certainly an artist to be reckoned with and worthy of this exhibition which will hopefully make up for her being rather overlooked other than in her native Finland, in her lifetime.

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Helene Shjerbeck, Royal Academy of Arts.

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Frank Bowling RA at Tate Britain.

The retrospective of Frank bowling at Tate Britain could be seen as the ultimate Understanding Painting Media course. We are taken from his time at the Royal College of Art, where the influences of Pop Art and Francis Bacon are clear to see in these early paintings, through to the work he is making now by directing his assistants with the swirling layers of liquid paint over large areas of canvas.

I gained a lot from seeing these paintings and learned how easily an artist can understand and take from the work of others while making it very much their own voice. There are direct references to Rothko and Barnet Newman and the whole modernist abstract expressionist movement intertwined with a deep seated Caribbean heritage that is apparent in his combinations of colour and the subtle use of stencils of his family home in New Amsterdam Guyana and the outline of the South American continent as recurring motifs.

Once he had started working completely abstractly, his work became very large and and the manipulated paint, although perfectly balanced for colour, was allowed to work its own magic as if the artist was setting it free to flow and move wherever it wanted. I like the way he has used tape and resin and the way he has buried  small objects in glutenous paint to break up an otherwise flat surface. He not only accepted the accidents that will happen but embraced them all wholeheartedly as in this painting where the ring from a paint bucket creates a focal point within a nebulas space.

These pictures show me so many of the possibilities available to the painter and that the more willing one is to experiment the more one can learn. The use of colour, texture, size and space have given me a great deal of inspiration and show me that I should embrace the random and keep experimenting into the future.

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Frank Bowling, The Possibilities of Paint. Tate Britain.

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Part Five:Reflection

Demonstration of technical and visual skills

I’ve used as many differing materials as possible and have been learning a lot especially using inks and watercolour. It would take me a lifetime before I became successful with watercolour. Hopefully I have shown that I’ve attempted to represent what I see in front of me in a coherent and balanced composition but this is not always easy especially when painting on the street.

Quality of outcome

I still find it difficult to assess my own work but I think that I’ve used all my knowledge to the best of my ability and have tried to give a good sense of my local environment through these exercises.

Demonstration of creativity

I hope to be on my way creatively and experimentally with the assignment work as I’ve tried everything and made some diverse and interesting discoveries.  It helps to discover that most of the artists we have been asked to look at also have widely variable practice. I don’t know if my personal voice is developing, if it is then this is it.

Context

I have put myself under pressure to complete part five and because of this it may not have been as pleasurable as I would like but the discipline has been good for me. I am aware that my research writing has been weak throughout the module and I have not written enough nor have I written up analyses of the exhibitions I’ve seen because I am still unable to put down my thoughts in an academic way and the time that I should spend improving this skill is spent on the practical work. If I get through this module successfully I will definitely try harder for level two.

Part Five:Painting with Oils (a short essay)

Jan Van Eyck

 

Oil paint is my medium of choice. By taking some pigment dust, say from a precious stone, oxidised metal or long compressed clay and add a little water or egg yolk or acrylic polymer emulsion and you have a vibrant mark making material that dries very quickly and is relatively permanent. Take the same pigment and mix in a little oil, preferably from linseed, walnut or poppyseed and you have an unctuous, glowing medium that can be spread on canvas, paper or wood. One of the beauties of this medium is in the way that it dries, and in the way that one can speed up that drying process by adding a thinner, like turpentine or white spirit and now, with contemporary painting, substances made from citrus fruit, for example “Zest It”, my personal favourite.  Alternatively you can slow the drying process down by adding more oil. The artist and historian Giorgio Vasari (Vasari 263) credited the dutch artist Van Eyck as the first painter to use this medium and around the same period another painter from the Netherlands, Robert Campin also used oil paint as his primary medium. These and subsequent painters discovered the beauty of layering glazes of translucent colour one upon the other and I would have imagined started to learn to apply some rules to this practice. I wonder who first discovered that the rate at which the paints dries can be determined by the ratio of the amount of thinners to oil mixed with the pigment. I then wonder who first discovered that if they painted the first layer with a mixture that was predominantly oily and the subsequent layers too thinned with spirit that the surface would crack due it it drying out quicker than the under layer, therefore creating the cracqueleur that is often seen in paintings of some age.

The act of applying oil paint to a surface can be joyful, tedious, frightening and uplifting. Firstly one must make a combination of some primary colours on the palette in order to get to the shade or hue that is required for its purpose. Creating this mix until it is just right can take care and consideration perhaps using a flexible palette knife to turn over and over and squash these colours into just the one required. A brush can then be selected according to the mark that the artist can only imagine at this point then used to take up the precious mixture, transport it to the surface and leave there with just a gesture from the hand or arm. It could be a dab  a drag or a stipple, a sweep of the arm or a corrugation from the wrist, it doesn’t matter as long as what is left behind is pleasing the eye. Even if this isn’t the case a finger or thumb can be used to move the paint to a better position or a rag used to wipe away the mistake. It doesn’t matter if it gets late and the light fades because with oil paints it is easy to start again tomorrow.

 

 

Portrait detail Helene Schjerfbeck

Flowers in a Window Ivon hitchins

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Elkin, James.What painting is. Routledge 1999.   Smith, Ray. The Artists Handbook. Dorling Kindersley 1987.  Vasari,Giorgio. Lives, ebooks.adelaide.edu.au  1550.

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National Gallery  London

Pallant House Gallery  Chichester

Royal Academy of Arts  London

Part Five: Assignment

Bricking it.

For this assignment I have been looking at what might be unique to my local environment and decided that it was the humble brick. During the 18th and 19th centuries the local brickworks was very productive and produce beautiful red bricks and many of the village front garden walls were built with a variety of shapes of local bricks. These were put together to make unusual lattice patterns and are a distinctive sight throughout the village.

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Having taken this assignment on I had to decide how best to present an insight into this local architectural art form. I wanted to be as experimental as I could while thinking about the subject as a whole so I have revisited a few areas that I had dipped into during the course of this module.

These are some photographs taken with 35mm film that I developed and scanned and was thinking that I might try some monoprinting from acetate that had been quite successful earlier. As can be seen, each brick in these patterns must have had its own individual mould and my first thought was to dissect these and make a small study of their shapes. I have previously cited work by Lisa Milroy and wanted to show these isolated shapes as individual bricks spread out on a white background. To allow me to get a sense of the texture I used tempera on paper. The layers of paint dry quickly and a leave a very pleasing surface. The hint of shadow around the edges pick out the shapes well without over doing it and now it is finished I wish I’d made a larger version.

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I gained a lot of pleasure from the mono type process that I’d experimented with in part 3 and thought that it would be suitable for suggesting brick work. I used oils diluted with Liquin and painted freehand onto my A4 glass plate. I’d earlier discovered that reasonably lightweight cartridge paper was the best support for absorbing the paint and made sure that I registered this to the plate nice and square. The first print showed a lot of brush work and looked pleasantly abstracted reminding me a little of the vertical and horizontal geometry often used by Sean Scully.

I re-worked the paint and added more green and darker tones while trying to lessen the brush marks and I do prefer the result.

For the third print I have gone for a lattice wall and based the painting on a watercolour from part 2.  This one shows lots of brush work and manipulation that I think works better here than in the first print although some of the colour is starting to look a little muddy.

I took some ghost prints from the plates that have a lovely softness to them and the plates themselves often left a good result after the print had been taken.

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More experimenting has achieved some variable results, trying brick dust as a pigment just doesn’t work. I tried mixing with oil and water and using a small piece of broken brick to draw with and all failed completely. I have been unable to find the artist who inspired me to try this next experiment but there is an American artist called Mark Nystrom who uses data from wind readings to achieve similar results. I had hoped that a piece of brick might leave satisfactory marks but failed so I used brick red chalk instead attached to string with some C.D.’s to catch the breeze. This was hung from my camera tripod and then left to dangle just long enough to rest well on some cartridge paper. The resulting drawing is the marks made between 4pm on a Saturday and 10am Sunday morning.

The next experiment was to try frottage to pick out some details directly rubbing the walls. This was very difficult and the results were disappointing although a vague impression was left after using brick red and orange chalks.

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I tried to gain access to the old brickworks but it is now in private ownership and I didn’t get a reply to my enquiry. Although local planning will not allow demolition there will soon be a large private residence built on the sight and I’d hoped to a have a closer look before it was too late.  I’ve played with some landscapes of the buildings from my limited viewpoint and made these on 300gsm cartridge paper that I had primed with acrylic gesso mixed with brick dust. I used the same mixture to coat an old Jaffacake box and tried to replicate a housebrick with acrylics using tones to replicate the indentation.

The first painting of the brickworks themselves was made with acrylics using a photograph taken from the gate of the site. Using this rough gessoed surface is quite a challenge and I struggled to move the paint about but the dryness of the paint and rubbing back with fingers and rag was productive despite being tough on the finger tips.

The second of these was made with oils made thin and liquid with Zest It, allowing lots of manipulation. I worked the trees with thumb and fingers and used the wood end of the brush to incise texture into the surface and a rag to drag the surface paint thinner. Some of these marks are rather pleasing and I think that recent visits to exhibitions of Ivon Hitchins and Helene Sherjbeck have left a some influence on me.

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I made these next images by using clear acetate to print out some black and white photographs that I had taken earlier. I developed the film and scanned the negatives then printed the photographs onto the acetate with an inkjet printer. This results in the ink remaining wet on the acetate and allows for a monoprint to be taken from it. When the ink that has been transferred to the paper and has fully dried, I was able to gently add some watercolour to enhance the prints. I like these and think that a large series of work done in this manner could be successful.

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I have taken to making monoprints from the left overs on my glass palettes, one of which is a round glass table top. The resulting half round print left me in mind of the brickworks kiln dome. I dragged the remains of a rectangular palette across the bottom and thought it could make an interesting mixed media piece. Not sure in which direction to take it at this stage, I decided to apply some coloured inks using a broad coarse brush and a wad of tissue paper. It was quite exciting to get these bold marks by dragging the ink down the paper. Then I added a collage of a photograph and some left over strips of grey paper and tried to make some flowing marks with a small brush and black ink resulting in what I think is an abstract yet representational piece of mixed media. I had a lot of fun making it.

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Trying to tie all these pieces together to form a cohesive whole is proving difficult, each piece is connected to the theme but the diversity of size and the difference in process between them makes me unsure how to put them together as a whole. The more I rearrange them the more chance I have of damaging them. Some thoughts on the curation would be to combine them on one wall in a brickwork manner or even better would be to display them at the local village hall in the relatively new extension, the building of which was partly funded by members of the community who were each asked to buy a brick.

Part Five:Exercise 3

Well despite this looking like the easiest exercise on paper, it has proved to be the hardest and least successful. Again I blame my lack of skill with watercolour and my inability to find a corner anywhere that gave enough contrasting shadows that moved throughout the day. Because the light was always coming from the same window and the sun too high to cast direct shadows these paintings fail to show enough changes in light direction. Despite these failings I learnt a lot about laying little blocks of toned washes to try and achieve a sense of form and depth and the change in colour temperature throughout the day. I didn’t enjoy this exercise and was frustrated with my lack of success.

Part Five:Exercise 4

Much happier working with oils for this exercise and again finding a very limited palette an enjoyable challenge. There are so many lovely blacks to be made from just red, yellow and blue and even using these subtle tones it was not difficult to create a sense of form within the subject. Despite the almost monotone of the objects that I’d selected, the strong side lighting showed up the elements well, even on the white background, so despite keeping Morandi and Alex Hanna’s work in mind I find these are more defined and possibly more true to my own painting vocabulary. The objects within these compositions may appear quite ordinary and day to day but by re-arranging them they become small challenges within a composition. I’ve tried to view them as interior landscapes and certainly the last two had the intention of being able to see over the top in the way of a Cézanne or a Matisse.

Part Five:Exercise 1

Hydrangea in a terracotta pot is my chosen subject for this exercise and I’ve taken an A4 board coated with a raw sienna dark ground. I had William Coldstream in mind and wanted to use a relatively minimal oil colour palette with lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, terre verte, cobalt green, cerulean blue and ultramarine plus titanium white. Mixing cool and warm colours gives me the opportunity to make a wide range of subtle tones. The composition was not too complex but I was keen to show the bricks at the bottom which may have compromised the flower heads at the top especially as some of the canvas is lost in the clamping to the easel.

This piece took around two and one half hours to complete and by using plenty of zest it to keep the paint thin allowed me to to block in the main areas quickly and blend the tones wet into wet easily. I then sharpened areas with a rigger brush using the titatium white and degrees of black mixed from the reds, yellows and blues.