Exciting to imagine the sculpture on the painting.
Three stage of translating the sculpture onto the projector. I was about to begin drawing the sculpture free hand on the acetate but then I realised why am I not just printing the image and tracing it? I did this and it worked like a dream! It meant the traced projection was exactly the right proportions and angles as the sculpture and photograph. I will use this process in the future.
This what the projection looked like on the painting. It was then a matter of painting the white lines on following this projection. For detailed as I went thought and techniques of this painting process see my mini sketchbook.
Finished painting
I’m really happy with the final painting. And it really demonstrates the potential of this new process! This term has really been about finding a process of making sculptures and translating them well onto the canvas, and this painting is a culmination of all my learnings and refinements on this process.
The depth of the dome part of the sculpture was far harder to capture than I expected. But with the help of the sculpture the depth of the paint brushes shows through. Having two layers of domes made up of the curves really shows here because you can see one of the layers is less covered by brushstrokes than the other and so not so high up.
Before doing any sketches I wanted to see what angle and size would work on the painting. These rough digital sketches are really helpful.
First edit. Sculpture legs aren’t long enough because height of trees is captured although space and depth is.
This second one works because the legs are longer so a great height doing upwards is there. But I liked how big the roof was in the first edit, the roof seems a bit too small here.
An in between scale of the two edits would be best.
This is the first big painting of this term, but my process and scale etc is all built on what I was doing the term before. There are however a few changes I made to the painting process for this piece which has changed because of feedback I have had on previous paintings, and the want for an easier process.
I had a comment this term when talking with one of the tutors that my colours are a little dull in last terms canvases. He wondered whether my turps was dirty, and I said that it definitely was! I have worked in the past with greeny-muddy coloured turps because I have only had slightly muddy turps to work with and only one pot of it outside with me, which quickly gets even muddier. The other reason I thought my painting might be muddy is because the palette size I had outside was tiny compared to the size of my brushes. For this painting I wanted to change my outdoor painting system to address these problems.
The Muddy Turps Problem addressed
I brought two containers for turps to go in this time. And worked with clean turps instead of muddy stuff.
Too small paint palette addressed
Before I had a white tile that I was used to using in the studio or when I didn’t have my massive glass palette:
This tile was hardly any wider than my biggest brush, but it was also extremely heavy and so impractical for carrying outside.
I don’t have a big enough reusable palette for this, but yesterday before I went out painting I had the not so radical idea to use greaseproof paper taped to a cardboard sheet instead! This is a cheap and customisable mock up of the fancy reusable palettes you can buy. For this I taped two layers of greaseproof paper to the thick card, with the idea that when one layer got too messy I could take it off and have a fresh one beneath. The thick card was also super light! And I could slot it at the back of the canvas when carrying everything outside.
This worked so well!
Before I started painting. These are the colours I used.
You can see ^ the flat palette knife here that I used for the first time outside to clean the palette and mix colours. This worked so much better than mixing paint with a brush. Mixing with a big brush meant all the paint would get pushed inside the massive brush head and I would waste so much paint because it got trapped in there! Mixing with a palette knife was far more controlled and meant I could mix in a smaller paint with less paint wasted.
The mess! After I finished the canvas.
You can see on this image^ that the colours I was mixing hardly mixed because there was enough space for colours to sit side by side. And having two layers worked really well as well.
Location
I did a sketching session before bringing the canvas outside where I wondered through the woods and found the spot I wanted to return to and paint. I picked this spot because the canopy was so dense I could hardly see the sky! And the colour palette was lovely and springy and fresh green. The trees in the foreground were also arranged in a shape that I imagined my most recent sculpture would fit into well.
Doing this pre painting sketching session was very useful because I could explore locations without having to lug the canvas around to do so.
The weather was still, cloudy and warm. It had rained heavily an hour before and so everything looked and smelt lush, and it felt like it could rain again soon, luckily it stayed dry the whole time.
The painting in stages
I tried to apply paint really thickly onto the canvas towards the end of the process. This was due to thinking about the thickness of paint earlier this term. I used lots of Liquin towards the end for thickness and so colours wouldn’t blend together, and used less turps than in the past because turps removes texture and thickness.
The finished painting
The colours are so much brighter than anything I’ve painted before! This is fitting since I painted this in spring. And previous canvases were painted before the everything blossomed etc.
I’m not sure how I feel about nearly all the colours being very bright. I was talking to some people in my studio and they were saying how they liked the pastel colours in my previous paintings, and they seemed to describe the colour palette of a woodland more accurately. I think a good medium would be to use muddier colours but also know how I can achieve brighter colours if I wanted them, and use a larger spectrum of bright and muddy colours:
Overall I’m happy with how this painting turned out. My painting process and been refined and I learnt far more than I thought I would. Applying thick paint with Liquin at the end of the process, turps at the start and pure paint in the middle. This process works really well and this painting has more texture and depth of marks than ever before (harking back to Howard Hodgkins when I think about paint layering and depth).
It was really fun to do one of these big paintings in a new season. I’m looking forward to adding the structure on top.
I was writing in my sketchbook that I wanted this final sculpture of the term to be geometric. But when I sketched ideas out in my sketchbook I realised that fan faults are the most iconic Cathedral architectural feature, so this is a shape I need to explore! This shape is both simple and intricate and so I thought it would be interesting to see translated back onto the canvas.
I used super tough wire for the armature of this sculpture and it worked so much better than the thin wire I had been using before! I could manipulate one end of the wire without the other being distorted as well, which made the process of getting straight lines and smooth curves so much easier.
The part I struggled with the most for this stage was attaching lots of layers of wire ends to each corner of the octagon frame. It began easily, using thin wire to tie two ends of wire frame together. But I ended up attatching so many ends to each corner that I ran out of wire, but also each corner got unnecessarily bulky. It would have been better in retrospect to have more wire, because more wraps of wire made for stronger attachments, but also, instead of making each curve as I went and adding the curves one at a time, it may have been better to make all the curves before hand, and tie them all together at once, attaching all of them to each corner of the octagon frame at once. When I make more structures in the future of this kind I’ll try this method.
I did consider just leaving the wire armature as the finished sculpture. The corners of the sculpture were ugly, but the wire on top did look so smooth and pretty. I knew however that I needed to add the paper mache because that meant I could smooth out the corners and paint it white as planned.
Another reason for adding paper mache that I realise only now having completed the sculpture is that covering up the wire and painting the structure white makes the shape look like nothing recognisable. When the structure was wire, the making of the sculpture was obvious – the maker had bent wire and attached it together to make this pretty shape. But when the wire is covered up and painted, the making process is far less obvious and the focus becomes the mystery and weirdness of the object, instead of the familiar artist’s process that made the object.
Painting the paper mache white removed so much of the surface texture and shadows of the piece. It makes the lines look a lot smoother and refined.
Finished sculpture thoughts and next
I’m super happy with how this sculpture turned out! Structurally it’s very strong. Using thick wire plus the paper mache and a complex set of structures on top means it is sturdy and stands easily on its own. Visually it looks best from either looking down on the top or looking up from below. The size of the sculpture means it’s tall enough to be explored from all angles (the size also meant it was big and easy to work with the shapes, too small = too fiddly). The curves of the arches are a great nod to cathedral architecture but the shape is simple and repetitive, and I’m happy that the shapes created by the curves from above or below are fairly symmetrical.
I can’t think of anything I could have done better at this stage, not because I think it’s perfect, but because I need to see how well the sculpture works in my paintings before I can say. Also this is such an explorative branch of my work – making these sculptures, all I want to say is ‘cool, now let’s make another one.’
Now I focus on drawing the sculpture, first in my sketchbook, then onto acetate, then onto a big canvas!
I was home one evening talking about my work and I was reminded of using a projector to project shapes onto the canvas to get proportions right etc.
SO I found an overhead projector – I chose this instead of a digital one because I can still hand draw the shape I want to project onto the painting.
Acetate proved the best paper (not greaseproof paper which I originally tried). This is the drawn shape, based on a photo of the sculpture and the most successful sketch in my sketchbook.
The I projected it onto the painting and traced the white lines on top! This made my life so much easier omg.
The result is so much more exact than the previous two paintings. I’m going to use this method from now on!
The thing I need to refine now is how I draw the sculpture – how far do I reduce the shape down to single lines? Here I think the structure is too curvy and complicated.
First of all I did a series of sketches in my sketchbook, this was the most successful and so I wanted a sketch like this but more refined on the painting.
Turns out it is a lot harder to paint this shape onto the painting than I expected!! Problems with the process of this experiment: – No ruler used to measure proportions or draw straight lines. When the structures I was drawing were very geometric I used a ruler for everything and it guaranteed nice lines. – I couldn’t think of any material that I could draw the structure with that was easily erasable when I made a mistake. The easiest was just going straight in with white acrylic paint, and wiping it away when I did something wrong. This is a slow process! And without being able to roughly mark the shape before I fill in the details I went very proportionally wrong very easily.
Problems with the finished painting: – Structure is very curly and wobbly. The reason my geometric structures worked so well in the past was because they were angular and straight and so were a direct contrast to the curvy random blocks of colour. – The legs are too thick. They draw too much attention. This just requires more patience for drawing very thin precise lines! Using a ruler would help a lot.
This is such an important part of my painting I need to get this process and drawing right!!! Improvements for the next test: – I had a grand idea last night: use an overhead projector to project an accurate drawing onto the painting! This should work far better. – Use a ruler! – Use one kind of paintbrush throughout so for now the lines are all the same thickness.
I thought it would be useful to see how the sculpture will look in the painting, giving me an idea of how a drawing would look in real life.
The right hand angle looks way better, the angle on the right makes the shape look flat and not dimensional. I discovered this in my sketchbook and this is proved again here.
I did no practice, I just started on the paper – turns out that was not a good idea!
I first mapped out only the lines, following the pattern I made when drawing the sculpture straight on. But the shape didn’t make any sense. So i blocked in the white to see how that would look.
That looked slightly better, but still very terrible.
The I thought well it’s not working so I’ll just add grey shading and see what that does.
I used a white posca pen to do the white, because it is smoother and faster than acrylic paint, for these experiments.
What works
Laying the structure on top and underneath the paint layers. Although this was hard to do because the painting was so dense with brushstrokes and I hadn’t planned it.
White colour. Contrasts well against everything else.
Blocking in areas in white of the shape. Actually works surprisingly well. It makes the shape make more sense as a design. If the sculpture had less blocked areas, filling in with white would be less obtrusive.
What doesn’t
Grey shading. Helps to create dimension, but if the drawing and sculpture is good enough, it shouldn’t need it!
Wobbly legs. Just use a ruler! The more exact the better. For some reason all the things I learnt, such as exactness and measuring from last term went out of the window.
The whole thing! The sculpture is not drawn accurately enough to make sense and so it fails.
The angle of the sculpture and where it is placed. Needs to be planned and considered. Having a less confused painting underneath would help with this.
Scale. The bigger the more all encompassing and vast. But I knew this, and I will be going bigger v soon.
Next
Plan my next attempt! Use digital editing to do so.
Practice drawing the sculpture at these angles in my sketchbook.
I painted outside just now to prepare the page for the sculpture test drawing I’m going to put on top. This was the first painting in this style I have done in what seems like a while! This is not really true, but compared to last term I have been doing less painting outside.
The woods that I painted in I am really familiar with. I have visited other woods, but I keep returning to this one. One reason for this is convenience – it’s right outside my studio and so I don’t have to haul all my painting equipment a long way. But also, I was listening to a podcast yesterday, this one:
And they were talking about returning to the same objects or places again and again. It made me consider how I have returned to this same woodland for over a year now, and how that impacts how I paint and what I experience. I haven’t got any answers as of yet, but it’s an interesting thing to consider. Is my painting affected (for good or bad?) because I return to the same woods? Am I training myself to notice new things whilst painting in the same environment?
One thing I did notice about these woods from where I was painting was the depth of layers of trees and foliage. This photo contains the view that had this depth, you can see trees in the distance that are lighter, washier shades of green than the foreground. It was a lovely place thing to try and paint on part of the paper.
I painted this view as well as a clearing to the left of it, where I imagined the sculpture I had made to sit.
Painting process
Acrylic on paper. For speed and ease.
^ This is a screenshot of a zoomed in image of a painting I did last term (oil on paper). Looking back on it it strikes me how effective the paint application is – there is so much depth. I think there are two reasons for this: – Thickness of paint: I remember using a lot of Liquin with the paint to bulk it up and make it very slidable on the canvas. The thickness means the paint layers hardly mix with one another, instead they look like they are floating near each other with space in between them. – High contrast in tone: The dark background behind light blue behind varying tones of colour marks. Contrast creates greater separation between marks, making them seem more separated.
I have only considered the second reason now, after already painting this most recent experiment. I would like to test these two ideas in a series of future paintings. I wondered whether having not many marks on the canvas also added depth, but looking back at Howard Hodgkins work that doesn’t seem to be true…
Although I didn’t follow through with the idea of high contrast tones, I did make sure the paint was applied very thickly.
Finished painting before adding structure
What works
Thick pain: It does add depth, and it prevents the colours from mixing together.
C shapes marks are lovely! I realised I was reducing boughs of trees into these c shape marks. Describing blocks of leaves and branches with blocks of colour.
What doesn’t
I applied paint too thickly too fast, without considering my marks and colours enough. I ended up battling with the thick paint.
My palette was too small. When applying thick paint, I needed to mix a lot of paint in a variety of colours, so I needed lots of palette space to do so! Because I had a small palette, colours were easily getting mixed up, and I could never get the right shade, because it was mixing with other colours and going muddy. As a result the colours are dull and low contrast.
Lots of small marks added at the end. Disjointed, no sense of direction, so feeling of woods whatsoever. This is due to me battling with the thick paint as mentioned above, and adding lots of unnecessary marks on top to try in vain to get the colour and layering of colours that I could have put down earlier in the painting process.
Page too small. I am used to working with big canvases now! Which means lots of room to fit in all the layers and detail I wanted. I was trying to cram too much onto a tiny piece of paper.
Improvements for next time
Bigger palette
More contrast in tone.
Do underpainting of a block (dark?) colour – like I’ve been doing before! I don’t know why that went out of the window.
Keep the thickness of paint, just don’t start adding so eagerly and early. When working with really thick paint, colour mixing and placing of marks need to be carefully considered!
This has to be one of the worst paintings I’ve done in a while. OHWELL. I need to do some more, since I have learnt so much from doing this one.
Klint, H.af et al., 2005. 3 X abstraction : new methods of drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz and Agnes Martin, New Haven, Conn. ; London: Yale University Press.
I wanted to read more about Kunz’s work since I realised how similar her drawings are to some cathedral architecture. Surprisingly the only book I could find on her in the library was this one, but it is actually very relevant to my work.
Chapter ‘Abstract’ by Catherine de Zegher
preceding the abstraction there is something from which the form has been drawn. While this something may be a concrete object in the phenomenological world, it could just as well be understood as the formation of an idea apart from any perceivable object in the phenomenological world.
P.23
^ This is what the structures I make in drawing and sculpture are.
Abstract art can be envisaged as an oscillation between the imagined and the concrete… with both to draw from and to draw form
P.23
Zegher goes on to say that the three artists in this book don’t approach abstraction ‘as a kind of formalism’, but as a way to structure ideas of philosophy, spiritual and scientific ideas. Kunz for example draws to connect ‘a cosmology of invisible forces’ – I love this idea!
These woman’s projects were aimed at summoning an ideality understood not only as a rational model of perfection but also as an emotional model of relinquishment… and response
P.24
Using drawing as a tool to elevate the mind. P.25
Their work was is inspired by an interest in nature and therefore human life.
A connection between the ‘physical phenomena and the spiritual universe’.
Using art as a bridge between the spiritual and the experimental makes sense to me. Abstracting things on a canvas that cannot be seen in the rest of life seems a way of capturing things that cannot be said with words. Things to consider in my work for sure. This is the kind of writing that I will read and only realise the total implications of it far from now! I wish I had more time in this project to read the book carefully, without a deadline fast approaching.
