Homesickness Paintings

I was looking through my work from this year and found a couple of paintings from a drawing and painting project which I really didn't enjoy at the time, but in hindsight I'm pleased with it now. During a project I can often judge myself too harshly but getting some distance from my work can be really useful.

I used acrylic paint for these paintings. The floral pattern was from an armchair that a classmate had used in a sculpture. At the time I was feeling a bit homesick having just moved to Dundee from Glasgow so I was thinking about home comforts or the lack thereof.

For the first painting I stuck some tissue paper onto some stretched cartridge paper then made a textured acrylic ground using wet and dry-brushing techniques and left it to dry. I then simply painted the pattern on using acrylic and added some subtle stitched elements, because textiles, to me, give the idea of homeliness. It was also an obscure reference to the film "Manon des Sources" where one of the characters stitches a ribbon into his own skin, above his heart. The scene is very painful to watch and is kind of a graphic representation of the feeling of unrequited love - a feeling of longing which to me is similar to homesickness. 

The blue and white painting was more unexpected. I intially painted a bright red ground onto some stretched cartridge, but it looked too garish so I covered most of it with some white tissue paper. I then painted the pattern using different shades of blue but the red still looked awful so I painted all the red bits white then wiped it back a bit using a cloth to make it a bit more textured.

Universe Book Project

One of my favourite briefs this year was having to produce an illustrated story. I decided to combine my interests in art and physics and make a universe creation story. I started off by doing a bit of research into the big bang. What I found fascinating about the scientific and philosophical theories I looked at was that so many centred around the idea that humans are the reason for and hence the creators of the universe. I tried to combine some ideas from quantum theory and the anthropic principle with religious creation theories to highlight that both science and religion are, to varying degrees, leaps of faith, and also to show my conclusion that that everyone needs to be important, to some extent, to be "God".

I produced a series of illustrations in my A4 sketchbook, then printed off scans of them and made a little A6 book. I found illustrating these abstract concepts challenging but very enjoyable. Here is the result.

Sails Project

Often the most unexpected work comes from starting a project by doing some straight observational drawing and using the drawings as inspiration. At the start of this project I had no idea what the outcome would be, but after doing a series of drawings I decided to use this one as the stimulus for a final piece:

This came from the only life drawing session I have had all year, an issue which my art school needs to address. Anyway, I really liked the set up with sails hanging from the rafters and beach equipment scattered around. I loved the sweep of the sails and the strange contrast of the models with the setting. I started playing about with this idea using a mixture of media - acrylic paint, magazine cuttings, ink and fine-line pens, and ended up with a series of collages:

The text "stack: error: undefined offending command: opp" happened by accident during my development work - I printed off a picture I had scanned and found there had been some kind of printing error which had added this text on top of the image. I liked the effect but not being great with computers had no idea how to replicate it other than typing the words into Microsoft Word, printing them off and sticking them onto my collages which (I think) created an interesting relationship between analogue and digital.

Page Project

I have a huge collection of old books from charity shops and skips, so I decided to use some of them in a pure collage project - I didn't use anything other than pritt-stick, scissors and the pages of the books because I didn't want to distract from the interesting qualities of the old paper and dated photographs and illustrations.

The images in this project were based on the idea of people being unaware of their surroundings - blissfully ignorant of what is going on around them when they are going about their daily business. To show this I contrasted images of cosy domestic settings and people absorbed in their activities with other-worldly, alien looking images of marine life and outer space, both of which I find fascinating.

I tried to combine the images in a way that was relatively subtle with the idea that you almost wouldn't notice the anomalies in the pictures if you only glanced at them.