Reflections

October 25th. 2013

The serious stuff starts now!

The brief for after half term at Leith School of Art was to come back with a theme for the rest of the year. This had to be something to work on and expand throughout the year.

I was thinking of movement which would include the sea, waves, people, musicians playing their instruments. etc. It occurred to me that to focus on the sea meant  getting there frequently to sketch in spite of being too far away and winter approaching. The cost of petrol, accessibility etc. was too much. As I am not in touch with musicians in the same way as I used to be, sketching them was going to be difficult.

I decided on "reflections" as my theme. It includes everything from a puddle to self reflection. Shadows and the nature of illusion came to mind and how what we see is only through our eyes, light distorts, glass, silver and water have no colour and yet are alive with reflections.

 The first painting was oil on prepared paper, A4.
I worked mostly on getting the metal bowl to balance with the white mug. As there is very little room to work in, they were balanced on my palette and the yellow paint ( right corner ) is what is reflected in the bowl. At first the mug was too white and I had to thicken the paint and add more  colour to balance it.

November 1st. 2013

The brief was to experiment, do several paintings and not try to produce a finished work.

First painting of the day was tentative, thinly painted and not working. Matt ( tutor) told me to do two very small paintings, quickly within the hour, using paint more thickly, cleanly and without using zestit to muddy the colour.


The painting on the right has a better composition and it made a difference being limited by size. Much easier to see just a small part of the image and make the most of the shapes.

I went back to the original painting and attacked it with more sense of what I was doing.

The final painting was the two items, painting more thickly, mixing more paint and slapping it on to create more life and less preoccupation with detail. One of my bad habits is to get too pernickety.

The composition is not good and it is still too tight but overall, better than when I first started it in the morning.

What I have learnt from this is how much I enjoy the complications of things, clutter and detail.
My brief for next week is to find more objects, arrange them better so that there is not the problem of space versus muddle.
I also have to make a list f artists whom I would like to paint like and those whom I definitely don't identify with.