Where art meets meaning, and your space meets you
Short one this week as blogging from my phone as my laptop died and I cannot decide whether to buy an I pad or laptop.
Meanwhile I’m back in the swing of painting and making as I settle into my new 9 to 5 role. It’s amazing what a rested mind will do for art and creativity.
Continue reading “Mixed Three Mixed Media Techniques”Below is a collection of paintings and initial drawings I did at the City Lit Abstract Painting Weekend Course. It was fun. There were lots of other painters there.
Some of us ate at Itsu Covent Garden on the pavement at lunch and watched as the Free Masons tried to recruit more members from people (men walking by. Our lunchtime vista was a strange mixture of men wearing dark Crombie coats, hell’s Angels, and a couple of Harley-Davidsons on the pavement.
Perhaps that inspired me to create this really feminine piece of work below. Some of the feedback in the crit was that I have a really light hand. I felt light creating it, so that was nice to hear.
Continue reading “Abstract Saturday/ Sunday”What advice would you give to your teenage self?
Sometimes I feel I have put off nurturing my creativity for too long. Other times I think it was seen in other parts of my life, like photography and property development.
My recent efforts with oil paints have highlighted the many choices I still must make around my style and my medium of choice.
I shall post an update on this painting when it is completed.
Urban Rooftop Landscape Oil Painting the Making
Our teacher took us through some portraits this week in my art class. The usual classics were there for us to study composition, tone, paint strokes etc. But I was struck by how much I was drawn into Julian Opie’s work.
I’d never seen his work before, and I noticed how my eyes were pulled into pattern finding.
However, I took on the challenge of seeing what my marks and finish might be like if I painted in the style of Julian Opie. I initially thought it might be easy; perhaps I was being lazy, but when I realised the attention to detail demanded in getting the contrasting tones right. Another hurdle I had to surmount was the light and the dark shapes to make sure those correctly gave the impression of light and shade. I discovered in class that trying to do this using oil colour is another difficulty because Julian Opie probably uses acrylics. But never mind, it’s all practice.
Making my life difficult wit oil on canvas board
Mixing the shades and tones
My art classes for drawing and painting ended last week and inspired a new focus in my portrait paintings.
I noticed the extent to which I’m interested in the deeper anatomical elements of the skin. For instance, I noticed I spent a lot more time than others in the class on the intricate details of features such as thread veins and fine lines.
While mixing the different colour skin tones, I got the idea of potentially using my cosmetic chemistry insights and knowledge to develop a series of figurative paintings in future. I will link back to this post when I have done the paintings influenced by insights I gained this week.
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