10/10/18
After applying some of Richard Serra’s verb list, ‘to disarrange’, ‘to support’, ‘of conflict’ and ‘to erase’, we were set the task of drawing it.
We we were encouraged to make marks that were more abstract and expressionate than those of realism. As a team, we saw our sculpt to be very expressionate, featuring conflicting materials to form our final outcome.
When I heard that we were going to be drawing our sculptures I was worried about the outcome to begin with. This is because I have never tried drawing or painting in an abstract style before- going strictly against my more precise and realist approach. I felt like this workshop really pushed me into thinking more creatively and stretch my comfort zone- both in the materials I used and the style.
We began the session by each practising and experimenting with the new materials posed to us- those being quink and bleach. As well as these, we also were able to use black and white acrylic, compressed and willow charcoal and Indian ink.
I began by using a toothbrush to swipe quink in two zig zag motions in the centre of the page. I did this because I didn't know where to begin, so it made it easier for me to then have something to work with. After this, I dripped bleach down the quink causing a gradient in themem as they made their way to the bottom of the page. I really liked this effect as it wasn't controlled and I allowed the ink and bleach to move freely down the paper. I used compressed and willow charcioal to add dimension to the ink, creating shadows underneath the ink and around the page- acting as a border.
After experimenting with different techniques, we moved on to create our astract pieces based on our sculpures from earlier in the week. Instead of doing a piece on the whole sculpture we used a small viewfinder to focus on a certain area of interest in the piece. This worked really well as I didn't feel overwhemed by the scale of the piece and therefore didn't concentrate too much on exact dimensions.
I began by using a big brush to mark in some keys from the keyboard, roughly placing them where I could see them through the viewfinder.I enjoyed using the viewfinder as it encouraged me to keep referring to the actual sculpt and rather from my memory and I think this can be seen in my piece. The ink caused unexpected drips down the paper however, although unplanned, it reflected to disarrangement and conflict in the sculpture and i continued to add more drips into the piece in the same way I did in my experimentation.
I decided to use more acrylic in this piece tha in my experiment as I was able to mix the black and white to produce different shades of grey. I used all of these shades to paint the itssue paper that was pertruding from underneath the keyboard keys. I tried to use it in a way that made it look like the tisue paper was bursting out of the keyboard.
Although I am really pleased with the outcome, if I was to do this again, I would like to incorporate the use of charcoal more as I really liked the texture it created in my piece. The keyboard included a lot of vibrant colours, mainly featuring in the tissue paper. I'm glad that we kept the pieces to a limited colour palette as the incorporation of colour may have complicated the composition and diverted away from the task of focusing on the marks being made.
The pieces made in this workshop have really helped to tie in the aspects I have learnt from previous tasks and workshops.
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