Diploma with honours - Term 6 End block week

Colour immersion week-find yourself-Sarah Brock

I made a big mistake, I thought that I could do this week and still be a volunteer reader/writer for NZCEA mocks the following week unfortunately the weeks clashed so I had 2 days to do 5 days work in. Spoke to Sarah about what was expected for the week and did some prep work in the weekend. Had fun using crayons and acrylic, my only issue was I had a crack at putting gesso on 110gm paper front and back to apply acrylic paint to. Sketched on my design and it was a disaster! The gesso was like plastic, it deadened the paint, no spread ability!, no blend ability! I chucked it and admitted to myself that I need to buy canvas paper! I finally settled on gesso covered calico to try and not the gesso I used before!

Every term there is an end of term exhibition. It is student run. You can have three pieces displayed as long as they are suitably prepared for the wall. I have put something in every exhibition since I started, mainly because it’s great to see your art up amongst other pieces and you do get feedback from fellow students and members of the public with favourite choice award (not that I’ve won that myself) which has been positive. What I don’t like is because the whole exhibit is run on volunteers and students who have not done one before your work is sometimes not displayed as well as it could be. 

Of course if you want to ensure that it is you help out, although that has at times not been a guarantee either.  I should have rethought my triptych of this term, although I was very proud of it, because of the different size and weights of the canvases I should have hung them myself and compensated for those differences as they were not presented at their best.

Diploma with Honours - Term 6 Mains

Wednesday Sustainable art practices Marc Hill 

I have written about Marc before and there is little I can add. He is a kind and gentle person, incredibly valuable when visiting exhibitions to Te Papa. I used my time there painting a series combining my Friday class. Starting the term with a lack of direction but finished it with another avenue to explore.

Thursday Print Marci Tackett

What a challenge! The term was supposed to cover drypoint which is a lot like sketching and is a way to use my visual diary drawings as a finished work exploring the inks and paper associated with print. Woodcut that opened a whole new world and screenprinting that I have tried before with Marci. 

I decided to have a crack at one particular type of woodcut for the term – Reductive woodcut where you use the one plate to get different coloured layers to a print by progressively destroying the woodcut as you go. So, never to go backwards, starting with a white layer of your paper and build up your image by carving away the plate (in my case MDF board) I choose a painting of mine a ‘Wet Wellington Day’ I made 11 initial prints hoping to get at least one I liked. I liked the fact I learnt a lot and the outcomes of some of the prints but did not get one that satisfied me overall. 

Registration, the squashing of the plate, the application of the ink, the impressing of the press – all should be able to be controlled but I’m messy, impatient and too much a perfectionist to fully enjoy the process and it took me eight days (not counting the nights carving) to get a less than satisfactory result. 

Marci and the others in the class were very encouraging and helpful even after they saw my bad mood side. I also had a bit of fun repurposing a book that was to be thrown out, I cut, painted, screwed and ‘waxed my book, highlighting words that mean something to me, telling a story.

Friday Painting Sarah Brock

Sarah is a very generous tutor and the group we had this term was small enough for all of us to be in the one room. (I did feel isolated last term being in another space) I decided to explore a new way of applying paint and I had to do this at home because of the unpleasant fumes I generated. I threatened the life of our dogs and cockatiel, not to mention giving myself a headache or two but was pleased with the outcome. I now have to find a less smelly way of doing more next term. 

Diploma with Honours - Term 6 start Block Week

Pastels- Sarah Brock

To produce strong colour using pastel one must use a good ground with ‘great tooth’. Sarah had us experimenting with different gesso on canvas glued onto board. The gesso was mixed with ‘grit’, pumice, oatmeal . We even used hessian and calico instead of canvas. This of course dictated a bit the type of image that would be better on the different rough surfaces, Images with fine details would be hard to put onto the hessian however you could get quite good detail on 1200 grit sandpaper. 

The eye is instinctively attracted to sharp edges and strong contrast. I had fun covering the boards we made in the first few days, rabbits on the hessian, oranges on the grit covered canvas, a nude on pastel paper and faces and lions on sandpaper. 

Diploma with honours - Term 6

Another term gone, two terms to go! These past three and a half years have zoomed by and yet they have been the most challenging of my life!

We are caught up in the world a lot of the time and things come at us that we simply react to. It feels that we do not have a great deal of control, that our lives are in response to influences and crisis outside of ourselves. At times I have wondered how I got this old and if this is what I wanted my life to be? I think that only in creative endeavours, whether it is painting or sculpture, photography or music etc, that we regain some degree of control over our lives. 

This creativeness, on one hand reminds us of the unique beings that we are and on the other hand pushes us to do something purposeful with it. It is a god given gift that can become a life long endeavour to perfect, enriching our and hopefully other lives around us. This is what the Learning Connexion has shown me. I have gained so much from my fellow students, I have been encouraged and helped unselfishly by people I have met there and I have tried to pay back in kind.

Diploma with Honours - Term 5 End Block Week

Sarah Brock – What hue where

Showing distance and form using colour not tone. The first three days we painted swatches and explored how colours affect other colours. 

We created the three complementary colour swatches, green to red, yellow to purple and orange to blue.  Woven together these complementary colour gradients show you the amazing range of options that you know go together. 

We did an exercise of producing a piece using photoshop to take out tone and painting two tone only darkest and lightest. I took a photo of my daughter I took years ago and produced three identical images using the three colour palettes. I’m really pleased with the result.