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.

Diploma with Honours - Term 5 2013 Mains

Monday – Thomas Robson – Abstraction

I had hoped the weather would allow us to go outside to paint every Monday, but it was not to be , I think there was only one  day that could have happened in the middle of the term and by then I was doing other things. I choose to have a bit of fun with watercolour, because it’s a traditional outdoor medium and because I wanted to dabble in it a bit more. 

Thomas has a wonderful eye for improving your work although with watercolour ‘fixing’ something is fraught with difficulty. I managed to produce a couple of pieces that I’ve given away to ‘new’ parents. (not abstract!) Still thinking of ideas to help me with my goal to produce some abstract pieces, I’m a realist I’m afraid and can’t just put something don straight from my brain. I need reference, fortunately I have a lot, I love to photograph things and I composite and colour match within the lens so know it will work on canvas, I often take more than one photo and put them together so they are not what was there initially.

Wednesday – Sarah Brock – A relationship with Paint

What can you say about Sarah, she’s so enthusiastic, about your work, about your ideas, about your process, about your result. I decided to continue with portraiture and utilise my ‘double sided’ canvas idea from the block week.  

The first week I picked a photo I had taken of my daughter a few years ago while on holiday, I chose to put on the ‘other’ side what Samantha was looking at. I covered three stretchers, two with canvas and one with calico and then went through the process of sealing the material and then gessoing . I produced six pieces on three canvases over the term in Sarahs class and Rogers.

Thursday – Roger Key – 2D Open studio

I used Roger’s class to continue what I was doing in Sarah’s class, doing two pieces at once in oil does have it’s challenges like finding a way of keeping one side from touching anything while your trying to paint the other. I actually broke my habit of only painting one thing at a time but it took me all term to get there.

I put two of my works in the end of term exhibit and they had to be suspended from the ceiling, make them a piece to be walked around ie a 3D piece, of sorts.

Diploma with Honours - Term 5 Start Block Week

John Cornish/Peter Adsett – Materiality

An interesting week, One where we were asked to explore a material that we were interested in. 

As I am mainly a painter, this was an issue because what paint does is represent something else when we manipulate it on a ‘ground’, this was something the class was not exploring. “The action of how you form the work is paramount “ “Use your affinity, your history, what is within you, to choose a material and what to do with it, repeat until you understand that material and it takes you on a journey. 

I did two things, first I looked for a substance that I could recycle and came across some omaru stone dust thrown out the back, I wondered if I could reconstitute (make it stone again to then carve or create a shape from) Second I bought in three stretchers and some material to cover them with. I stripped the material to wrap the stretchers in creating a double sided canvas. 

Peter Adsett  thought that my ‘playing’ with the material and wood should stop there but a canvas, no matter what it’s made of demands to be painted on. So I took some photos of one of the members of the class (both right and left profiles), and some front side and backside of some sparrows and used them to paint on both sides of the canvas, this demands that the canvas is no longer 2 dimensional, to be hung on a wall, these three canvasses had to be hung in the middle of the room so they become something to walk around, a three dimensional piece. I named the triptych ‘Birds of a feather flock together. 

The Omaru stone dust best ‘stayed together as balls and I created  a snooker set although the cue was extremely hard to finish, trying PVA, builders bond and just plain water, didn’t seem to make much difference to the final ball, they were all equally hard, crumbly. Something to explore in the future when I’ve got time.