7. New Wood, New Starts

(6/12/22)

Today I managed (just) to drag some new wood off cuts into college to be able to start some new paintings. My idea in starting multiple paintings at a time is to get the beginnings of a base texture down. What I start today may not be the end outcome of the final piece but it will be a layer to the overall piece, but the concept being that if I start them I can easily build on them. And often the mos difficult part is starting, so once that is out the way it can be a better and more fluent experience. 

(I have attached pictures of the new pieces below) 

The first painting pictured is white household paint spread on the board with my fingers. I felt this. Rested an interesting pattern and an interesting texture to be able to start from. 

The second painting pictured is paint and dried paint from the rims of paint tubs spread out on a board with splodges and splashes for more texture and dimension for the piece. 

The third painting is liquid latex spread out on the board with my fingers to create a box like texture and when dried the latex will turn an odd yellow / brown colour so built on.

The fourth painting, which I think will stay how it is, is black paint smeared with a paint brush on a wooden board. After much deliberation with myself on where to go next with this piece I decided that I very much like the energetic brush strokes and movement of the piece and I feel like it would be a gamble to add more because it could potentially ruin the piece and I wouldn’t be able to recover it. 

These starts that I have made have been consciously and unconsciously inspired and informed by a couple of artists. Firstly I will mention Purvis Young, who’s work presents a distinctive style of brushwork that appears in squiggle like marks depicting the forms of people, but his work contains much more than that, but these elements are ones I have been inspired by, although not to depict human forms. Rather opting to use my fingers to make overlapping and conflicting curving lines in paint that has an upward motion as an explosion does. Young implements abstraction when depicting people, faces and urban environments in his work, often opting to disregard depicting perspectives and in return depicts dense layers of human like forms, faces and buildings all using thair most basic elements of lines and shapes. And the way he constructs these shapes and images on his canvases gives the feeling and depiction of urban life on a city. (Purvis Young’s Work Pictured Below)

The second artist I have looked at since creating the work I did on this day. Specifically the painting only using black paint on a wooden background. The artist is Richard Hambleton who’s most popular and commercial work depicts silhouettes of human forms standing or in a motion such as a jump or riding a horse. This is work that I have since tied to the l piece I made an unconscious influence. Hambleton’s work has a lot of energy as you can see splashes of paint as if the forms were painted in a matter of seconds, but some out exactly how they were meant to be. With this speedy painting he gets the forms of the beings in his work depicted damn near perfectly. And the way he constructs his pieces on canvas is extremely striking and bold with stark contrast between Colours like black and white with fantastic textures he achieves through seemingly layering paints in his process. My work in contrast does not have the splash quality that Hambleton does, nor does it explicitly depict a human form, but there is an energy and movement to my piece that I enjoy as it is quite bold to leave a painting as if unfinished. (Richard Hambleton work pictured below)

Overall I am pleased with todays progress and I feel like I have a good variety of bases to work from and build upon. 

More Later,

Lots Of Love 

John Hancock X