Elective Project Painting

New Year and a new start to the first of my electives which is painting. First week finished and it flew, it was hard work but I am liking it more than the first semester. We were to choose a contemporary artwork which did interest us and build an installation which makes reference to it, got a bit worried first was wondering if my painting was ever going to happen. This envolved doing quite a bit of research as I was not too familar with contemporary artists but I did find a few who's work I found quite exciting (I'm turning a corner!)
I love these paintings by American artist Brian Rutenberg

These images have great colour and a little more going on in them so at first I decided to use this one as a start to build my installation but even though I liked this image it was a painting and my attempts looked too flat they were more like a mood board.

After this attempt I decided to go with something I had put together during christmas, this was influenced by American artist Jean Shin, she is known for her labor intensive, sculptural work with cast-off objects.

During the week we did some unusual painting exercises, we did blind painting, that is looking at the objects which you are painting but not looking at where you are painting them!

This was done twice over once vertical and then turned to horizontal in a different colour.
We painted negitave spaces
We painted with pieces of card, mark making can be done with anything if you use your imagination

Then it was back to our installation

                                                                More blind painting

Painting negative space wierd but there is a reason for that too

                                                 Another mark making with a piece of card

We had to draw a few thumbnails of our installation and paint one of them with four tones of the one colour
I think all of these exercises were designed to loosen us up!
We were given homework for the weekend, that envolved checking out some books of Lucian Freud who did paint very loosely, we were to choose one of his paintings and copy it exactely, so we go from loose to precise (maybe eventually with ease). Unfortunately the paper we were given was just like blotting paper and the paint just soaked into it immediately that was the only draw back.

Here is my progress

and finally

ENJOYED THAT