Monday 15th February
-
Tuesday 16th February
-
Wednesday 17th February
-
Thursday 18th February
I enjoy both the process and outcomes involved with this technique. All I do it lift my paintbrush from the paint-water at varying heights, and left the water droplet fall from the end of the brush to the paper. If it takes a bit too long, I'll shake or jolt the brush a bit. The first was done with olive oil and a pipette, while the other was made with heavily diluted acrylic paint. I get the impression that the paper I used was oil-treated, as the oil penetrated it much faster than the water, which was wet for hours. Had it dried sooner, I would have repeated the process in the hope of building up these beautiful, overlapping layers of water -- with a bit of colour. In a sense, the colour is what keeps the water visible, and I think it would be lovely to carefully document the presence of water in this way; showing how it comes and goes, but leaves a mark.
At a different point in the day, I was back in the kitchen, with paper and four pens at hand. Not sure what to do with them, I followed an urge to un-lid all four of the pens and start drawing with all four of them, simultaneously. I scribbled aimlessly and after a short while into the first drawing, I thought "these look like strands of my hair". Once that connection was made, I tried to build and build on this theme, sketching my hair in different states and styles, as well as extensions, waves and shed hair. It was a very honest session of work, where I was depicting something very familiar and personal to me for the first time. I really enjoyed creating these and am curious to see how people who aren't familiar with my hair type or my culture will respond to this. Curious, but also a bit hesitant because I feel like a lot of people will ignore the work.
I tend to create work for everyone to relate to or understand (perhaps this is a form of visual people-pleasing, I don't know) but this kind of work is much more exclusive; it's for people who get my culture - if you know, you know. I want to be okay with that, because even if I make art for everyone, it's not guaranteed that everyone will get it anyway, so I might as well just be myself and see who connects to it naturally.

Another "my vicinity" drawing on another day. I really like the composition and the balance of white space with the ink. At the moment, I can't think of anything I would change or do differently. That said, I would like to explore the best way to present these drawings; do they belong on a wall, framed or unframed, hung or laid on the floor... I'd like to really play around with this.
Friday 19th February
I painted these in my room, sat on the floor, all in burnt sienna. Sometimes when I'm stuck for ideas, I take a single colour (that is neither black nor white) and try to work with that alone. In this instance, I went for clouds, rather unusually. Clouds to me are either blue and white or black, white or grey. I liked the idea of using burnt sienna because I imagined the clouds looking like an old, vintage photographs, peaceful and serene.
The four paintings against the dark brown background are my favourites and I call them "wallpaper clouds" because the background stripes remind me of strips of wallpaper. I particularly like the contrast between the vertical lines and the horizontal motion of the paint. I hope to create more paintings like these.
Also, the vertical lines came from the marks on the washing machine paintings I didn't like that I scraped over, so they actually came from a failure. Reminds me of how seemingly unhelpful things can be used for good.
Comments