Weekly Summary 14.1.13 – 20.1.13
by Beauchamp Art
My week felt strangely insubstantial, I did not feel as though I produced much work, so come the weekend I had to paint and make something physical, I needed that release.
The Monday lecture and seminar was interesting, and the discussion of the Bauhaus contemplative. The painting workshop on Tuesday served as a useful exercise in mixing oils, and I managed to view the Lead show and the Outdoor Drawing Society.
The rest of the week I experimented with destroying my music, researching for my work and starting my essay, and trying to solidify some performative ideas, possibly involving collaboration.
I attended the Brainchild talk too, to see what I could learn.
Oil Paints on wood
A Portrait of Charlie, out with friends at a nightclub.
Here I wanted to try to ‘draw’ more explicitly with the paint, so began by diluting black oil paint [with some French Ultramarine and Burnt Umber] with turps, allowing for longer, more sustained energetic marks and scribbled linear elements, before moving on to using thing colours, which I rubbed back to blur it with large, dry brush, then painted the details of the face in smaller brushes, contrasting to the black marks.
A Need for Grounding
Chalk, Charcoal, Oils on card.
“What am I trying to say?”
I began by quickly drawing a number of loose figurative elements on the card, before they were transformed and engulfed by linear abstraction in an attempt to make the plastic feel more concrete, but in doing so rendered the whole form outside of the physical, which resulted in the illusion of a box resting on a dull reflective surface. Part way through the process, I wrote ‘WHAT AM I TRYING TO SAY’ across the image in black lines, which I then reworked into the composition.
I cannot justify this piece entirely, but the use of diagonals was a biting-of-the-thumb to the Bauhaus.
Our Fragmented Discourse
Chalk, charcoal, oils, acrylics on board.
Acrylic under painting by Henry Driver.
A portrait of Henry, from a video sequence recording our conversation over lunch.He gave me these boards that he no longer he had a use for, one of which featured a painting from a workshop exercise, onto this I decided to depict him. However, in this instance, I did not use a found photograph, but rather a still from a film that I recorded of our conversation whilst having our lunch. As the surface was not found, but rather given, I thought logically the image should not be found, but rather taken.
Moreover, I chose this particular angle to paint from as it was not quite a full profile image, nor entirely from behind, but somewhere in-between, so that only the outline of his features are visible, and his ear (what receives my part of our discourse) is at the centre, and highlighted. This also meant the figure was not entirely recognisable, nor his activity discernable, this ambiguity I found appealing.
I painted this from thin to thick paint, sanding down some parts of the early layers so that the texture of the original painting by Henry would come through to the surface more prominently.
No Moment is Ever Still
Oils on card
A painting of Paul Merton in motion, pulling a face, from a photo I took of the TV during the BBC show ‘Have I Got News For You’.
Here I wanted to try to hyperbolise the motion of the image, and the fragmented effect of the image lag due to the frame rate of the screen and the exposure time of my camera.
[I have no idea what I am trying to say.]
This work is so good.