Collage and mixed media
Archives for category: Painting
Collaged mixed media
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork
Mixed media on collaged paper patchwork.
Mixed media on cartridge paper with collage
First part of the wall drawing made this morning.
School has gone back only without me as I don’t have a school anymore. What to do? Having focussed on surviving the demise of GMS I now need to think again. I hadn’t really thought about what it would be like for everyone else to go back to school and not take me with them.
Yesterday I pottered about Norwich and didn’t get very far. Today I have been into the school in Lowestoft where I am going to be a volunteer artist in residence for half a term or so. I had sketched out a plan to make a large wall drawing/learning journal/art work/painting/sketchbook and when I last went there I had assumed that I would want to carry on making plates. This doesn’t seem such a good idea just at the moment. The plates were supposed to be commemorative and, of course, there is much less to commemorate now. It is all over.
The same themes of looking back and of recycling past art learning seems appropriate but now the work has to be about change and transition. Relocating myself and the work in a slightly new place. I realised the other day when I introduced myself at the MA shows that my usual ‘handle’ isn’t there anymore. A part of my identity for 16 years has gone with the school. I have others, of course. I could try on ‘artist’ for a bit, for instance.
I started mark making on cardboard on the wall this morning. I was thinking about Fabian Peake‘s work. I met him at the Cut on Saturday at the PV for his show there. I liked the work a lot. Especially the drawings in big plastic bags. Very imaginative and acceptably expressive, quite funny and witty. Quite boldly and straightforwardly worked. The constructions looked very different but the more I looked at them the more I could see the constructional aspects of the drawing and the more drawing I could see in the constructions.
As I have to ‘be an artist’ for a bit then I have to decide what sort of artist I want to be (again). What does my work look like if I’m not being a teacher at the same time? I’m not sure I can remember. This work is still in a school and there is still a public aspect to it. It is still a demonstration of something.
What I want to do is use the wall as a sketchbook/accumulator and work it over and over and see what happens. I need to bring some ideas into my head, I need some stimulus after the break and after using all of my head up on the plates; very focussed stuff. It is receding into the past though, which was the idea to make the plates so that they were connected to the school forever and not transferable in some ways. We’ll see. I could get fed up with painting and want to go back to ceramics in a bit.
What I want to do is some printing, mono-printing and some painting, probably all at the same time. I want the work to be blank and expressive at the same time and to be both abstract and depictive. At the moment I am referencing Lasker, Perry, Peake and Noskowski. We’ll see how it goes.
So before half term I made up a pile of images with the idea of making a ‘dream of Paladino’ piece as a tribute and as a way of thinking about the use of fragments in Paladino’s work. After half term I walked back into the classroom and saw the pile of things on the table and momentarily forgot why I had done it. And then I wondered why I had thought it was a good idea.
After a bit I decided to use them anyway and I quickly put together two ‘Paladinos” which worked quite well. I am not sure what they have to say about fragments though. There is something different about making fragments deliberately to put together into an image. I know what I am doing and I am planning ahead really, I am just building an image out of disparate bits. I make some more fragments on some more varied materials around the art room and make up another one on a small canvas. Not really very happy though. For the research project part of the point is that the different bits of the fragmentary practice are more broken up than that, more separated by time and materials and intention and part of the point is that they only look evenly vaguely coherent after the event. This is different to the bits being made as fragments.
To make a work out of fragments then the work has to be accidentally made as fragments, almost. If that can be done. Certainly I have been thinking more about leaving things undone or half done and not having the same need to ‘finish’ things. But I am not sure how I can deliberately make accidental fragments. Perhaps the point is that all of the work is made of fragments of time and effort and leave it at that.
Is everyone’s? I suppose I am again contrasting this with some sort of Ideal Artist deeply delving into their practice in long lonely uninterrupted hours in the studio as opposed to making stuff in the gaps.
I did a lot of ceramics work with the pupils last week and this and I made a couple of plates up whilst this was going on. I liked these a lot and this has started a chain of thinking about commemorative plates, Grayson Perry, Richard Prince and Lilly Van Stokker and further text pieces in clay.
Can You Tidy Up Now Please? 