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.