Photography: Greenbank Park

Taken: 20/05/2014

How do I find inspiration?

Hellooo,


Quick QUESTION and ANSWER...

How do I find inspiration?

I am surrounded by nature, and that is a huge inspiration for me, not only landscapes and seascapes, but seasons and the weather. It's been so cold lately, and I can see all my paintings have a lot of blue in them! I also love the internet for inspiration. It is a never-ending source of fascinating and diverse art at my fingertips. Current contemporary artists who I follow include Tim Summerton, the Australian artist. His work straddles abstract and figurative, and he works in layers, which gives a wonderful richness to the surface of his paintings. The more traditional British artist Andrew Gifford I enjoy for his lyrical capturing of light. His Istanbul series is evocative and beautiful.

How I begin a painting?

My paintings very often start with an idea and possibly a small drawing. Then I block out my canvas with washes of colour, I like to be spontaneous, and I try to push myself in terms of mark making. My canvasses have many layers of paint on them, and spend a lot of time on the floor having paint dripped and splashed on them, building texture. I use acrylic paints, decent quality acrylic is highly pigmented, and fast drying paint is extremely important as it allows me to move forward with a painting relatively quickly. Choosing when a piece is finished I find hard! I often have canvasses in my studio for weeks or months, waiting for me to make that decision.

In the Garden with Sandy Dooley

Bright Autumn

In an age dominated by conceptualism and abstraction, Sandy Dooley’s beautiful landscapes come as a welcome respite. Painting out-of-doors to capture the interplay of light and shadow, Dooley is spearheading an Impressionist renaissance. But this isn't just Impressionism churned out 150 years later – Dooley revitalizes the once-radical style with a contemporary twist, expertly capturing the tension between figuration and abstraction.

Still contemplating my techniques and ideas to complete my final project piece, I came across Sandy Dooley and love how she portrays a countryside character by using a chromatic palette and broadly applied atmospheric blotches of paint to form the wonders outside.

Landscape artist living and working in the beautiful Weald of Kent in the UK, Sandy is known for paintings that transport the viewer to the in-the-moment experience of being out in the countryside surrounded by the colors and visual richness of the natural world.

Her work captivated me as I am deciding whether to produce something similar in terms of vibrant colors, I love using color and texture in my work and I’m always attempting to use these elements to create a harmonious balance.

Spring Greener

Winter Blue

Given that her studio is in her garden and she works outside as much possible, Sandy exquisitely captures the moods of each season in her paintings – from the verdant greens of spring and warm tones of an Indian summer, to the deep rich hues of fall and the cool blues of winter.  Her work feels as spontaneous and lush as any garden with her vibrant colors.  

Its also like she uses the same scene in every piece of work but in different seasonal times which is what I have been looking into doing throughout my experiments though I have used watercolor because for me the unpredictability and uncontrollable nature of watercolor make it the most exciting and expressive medium to use even if its just to use as a block color or to add some minor detail.

Indian Summer

Coastal

Photography: Liverpool Sights

Going Local LIVERPOOL Heritage in Ruins

Going local, Liverpool, heritage in ruins:

Simply demonstrates me following the topics of research into my city and culture and what to make of the architecture in comparison.

I will determine and thoroughly investigate the old against new forces of contemporary to modern architecture and how I can come to terms with the heritage meaning 'the past' or just a sense of status that can be seen not only in the sites in which it holds but also city that surrounds it can be a greater clause than most.

I will also be coming to terms with the meaning of the term 'ruins' and that they not only define: "the remains of human-made architecture; structures that were once complete, disrepair given that in the time that they were built could easily come across as a name, status, a memory, or an image, however in this case I am looking at ruins that have been built up from that foundation of past and what competition has to offer.

Sigmar Polke: Extended Artist Research

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke grew up in East Germany. After moving with his family to West Germany, settling in Wittich, he studied glass painting from 1959 to 1960 at Dusseldorf Kaiserwerth and then transferred to the Academy of Art. With fellow student Gerhard Richter he formulated a Pop inspired "Capital Realist" anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. Paganini, an expression of "the difficulty of purging the demons of Nazism" - witness the "hidden" swastikas - is typical of Polke's tendency to accumulate a range of different mediums within one canvas. It is not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils. 

My reasons why I came to be so interested in his work was because I found out that he used techniques that allowed him to portray an image over an image; which was my intention throughout this project. Most of his pieces of work aren't as quite as good as compared to his expression works like the referral to Nazism. However, the thing that interested me the most whilst looking at his work was the fact that he used a larger scale in his work and how he interpreted three multiple pieces together but still made them flow through each one more effectively.

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure."

Developed Experiments

As you can probably tell my title is mainly portraying my work over the last month. It has been a hard couple of weeks because most of the time I don't even know what i'm going to accomplish or doing for the matter of fact. But it all just depends if that idea in your head is even worth producing and when you have done it you think its the best piece you've done yet.

So here are my developed experiments for my Final Major Project. From the end of March  have begun to experiment in mixed media rather than just painting because  find the more materials you use the better outcome you will get. Plus I can't go without using a Biro on any experimental drawing as you can see above. 

The techniques I have used for all of these works above are;

Printing, Acetate 'Window Sheet' techniques, painting using a roller, scratch and ink painting, collage textures, wax resist, and many others that I can't think of right now :'0

Over the Easter Break (woohoooo!!) I will continue to produce off-balance work and more ideas in order to produce and present my final piece.

John Piper

Ruin uses in Art

Ruin Uses in Art

One of the things I was researching is how ruins have been used in the past. There are plenty of examples of ruins integrated into cities, and it is interesting to see how these ruins were/are used.

Painting of ruins sometimes depict specific historical or biblical scenes, and are often not "snapshots" but rather imagined scenes. Nonetheless, the depiction of ruins in art can tell us a lot about how ruins were used historically and give us an indication of how the West thinks about ruins. Below are some examples of ruins in painting, along with comments about what we can learn from each.


Marco Ricci (1700s) Figures among Ruins
This picture captures an scene from everyday life. Women at the center launder clothing. A woman stands behind a table to the left, making it seem that this is a business and not just private women. Ruins were often open spaces in a city, and could be used for a variety of activities that required open areas.


Paul Brill (1580) Landscape with Roman Ruins
Ruins stand on both sides of a road. Rather than form a crucial part of the activity taking place, they seem more incidental. They sit on the edge of a built-up modern city, perhaps as a reminder. The road to the left seems to actually go straight through the ruin. In the lower left corner, we see a beggar. He sits both on the road and outside the ruin, reminding us that ruins could be inhabited by people on the fringe of society.


Alessandro Magnasco (1710) Banditti at Rest
Here too we see outsiders, the Banditti, taking up residence in ruins and using it as a resting place beyond the rules of society. Equipment is tied to the columns. A man plays guitar at the center.


Giovanni Pannini (1744) Apostle Paul Preaching on the RuinsThis work shows an event in the life of St. Paul, but demonstrates that a ruin was also a place for gatherings. Paul, it should be remembered, could be seen as a subversive element, so this may be another reason why he would preach in ruins.


Salvator Rose (1660-5) Anchorites Tempted by DemonsRuins were commonly used for monks to take up residence. This was fitting both because the ruins were secluded places, ripe for contemplation, and thought to be inhabited by demons. The monks were often called upon to fight the demons and prove that Christianity was superior to the demons. This was more common in isolated ruins at a distance from cities.


Claude Lorrain - The Campo Viccino, RomeRome was teeming with ruins. Here we see ruins amidst an open piazza being used as a recreation ground within the city. People gather, sit around, dogs run freely, and people ride horses.


Jacob Ruisdael (1657) The Jewish CemeteryRuins have a strong connection to death, and were often used artistically as amomento mori. Here we see ruins as the backdrop of a cemetery.

Computer Software Experiments

Hiya,
Lately I've started doing some computer experiments instead of just doing the same old thing. I've found it quite a challenge to be introduced to new software and to be able to work on it just after watching a tutorial on YouTube but it has been fun just to mess with all the tools they have and see how it turns out. So the programmes I have been using are:

• Photoshop
• Fireworks
• Paint.NET
• Photo pos pro

Yet Photoshop is not the only option. I've used Fireworks for many years now and find it to be by far the easiest and fastest way to get ideas out of my head and into pixels on the screen.

Let me be clear: I am in no way dismissing Photoshop or those who choose to use it. I use it for plenty of tasks. Personal preference is the most important factor when selecting your tools, and if your preference is Photoshop, then that’s what you should use.
Photoshop is a wonderful program, but its tool set is vast—it is used for a huge range of applications, from photo manipulation and illustration to 3-D modeling.
Photoshop:
Because i have never used this software before I had wanted to broaden my skill and working practice range by starting something new. SO what I tried to do here was to create the image over image idea by placing an image in a layer and then working with the tools to make it transparent so I could prepare another image in a different layer ready to group them all together and edit necessary parts of the image whilst using the magic wand and the paint bucket.
So this is how it had turned out:

Basically what I tried to create here was the reflections of the trees overlapped over a forest scene image.

Fireworks:

In fireworks what I wanted to do was to minimize the pixels of the quality of the image as well as to do some basic editing for example: grouping, and changing the overall hue and saturation of the image. The tools i used were colour contrasting and shape effects.

So this is how the grouping ones turned out: