Category: Week in Review

The eyes have it!

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Green, Painting, Week in Review

It’s been great to be back at school this week, though its made me acutely aware how quickly time is passing, and how hard I will have to work if I want to make the most of the course and the opportunities before me. Looming large is the Interim Show, which is a college-wide exhibition for first year students, due to take place in the second week of March at the Bouy/Chain Store, Trinity Warf in London. It is a wonderful space/location, and it will be a privilege to show some work there.

I’ve decided I shall align my submission for the show with my aims and objectives for my overall project about water, chief of which is to include figuration (people/creatures) in my work, and also to size-up (i.e. make bigger paintings). Whether I am able to achieve both or either in time for the show, remains to be seen. However, I intend to give it my best shot. To which end, this week I have been working on eyes.

Although I want my peopley-creatures to be quite loose and melt into their surroundings, I would like their eyes to be expressive and convey the emotion of a given painting. Again, it remains to be seen whether this is achievable.

It’s been a wrench to come off the Ann painting in order to focus on the Interim Show (IS) work. I only managed a couple of sessions of the latter this week. However, I’ve now put the Ann painting away for the weekend and intend to only bring it out for my early morning painting session from next week, leaving my other two sessions each day for the IS work.

My daily wanders down to the sea now include a little paddle. Inspired by a massage client who is an ardent Northern Dipper (i.e. a member a wild-swimming group here in the north of the Island), who claimed her daily dips in the sea have changed her life, I decided to get in on the action. However, the stretch of sea I live on is not safe to go swimming in, due to the fierce tidal currents in the vicinity, so I have to content myself with paddling my feet. Holy smokes it’s cold!

To be honest, my first attempt wasn’t very successful. I had left my shoes half-way up the beach, so that when I stopped paddling in the frigid waters, my feet were very tender, and it was too painful to walk across the pebbles to get to them. Never fear, with a bit of Kiwi-ingenuity I managed it.

I thought my first paddling attempt might be my last, until a little while later my feet began to tingle and I had an overall sensation that was quite delightful (my feet are tingling just thinking about it). Needless to say, I have been paddling everyday since. I can now understand why the Northern Dippers are committed to there daily dips, though how they are able to get themselves all the way under is a mystery to me – though I bet they feel amazing afterwards!

Speaking of the Norther Dippers, here is a Pathé inspired video I made about them for a film course I did last year with Berlin Art Institute (note my fella’s amazing narration).

The true romantics

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Week in Review

I’ve often thought that engineers and scientists, especially those of the aerospace variety, are the world’s true romantics. Watching the documentary “Good Night Oppy“, about the Mars-rover, Opportunity, confirmed this thought. The engineers and scientists who built and operated Oppy (as they affectionately called her) during her 15 year mission on Mars, came to love her passionately, and were heartbroken when she finally gave up the ghost. I challenge you to watch their final farewell to their dear Oppy with dry eyes.

Sticking with things romantic, my fella caught the dreaded COVID this week. It’s his first time getting it, and he has been a sick bunny indeed. We’re not sure where he got it from, though spending the previous weekend dancing outside Santa’s grotto dressed as a snowman and coming in contact with the town’s child population is the chief suspect. There’s no need to tell you how adorable he was as Ramsey’s dancing snowman, you can see for yourself in the video:

With my fella in quarantine at his house, I spent a solitary week in my studio at the Point of Ayre, working exclusively on the Ann painting (as mentioned in my last post). I am close to finishing it, and as always when the end of a painting like this is in sight, working on it is an irresistible pleasure. When I say close to finishing it, I reckon I’m looking at 2 months if I work on it exclusively, 3 if I work on some of my other projects as well. The latter is preferable, though it will be hard to tear myself away from Ann.

Because working on a painting like Ann is meditative, and therefore conducive to thinking through creative ideas, and due to the emotional turmoil of our current family crisis, as well as the added solitude, and, who knows, perhaps even the presence of the full moon, I was thrilled to find myself in a state of super-charged creativity, so I took the opportunity to think through and (imaginatively) resolve major aspects of my next (Ann-like) painting. I say imaginatively resolve, as I am yet test out my ideas to see if they will work; even so, it is an exciting step forward.

I reached another milestone this week – I have completed my first term of art school. It’s hard to believe how fast it has gone. Although I am effectively on holiday, there are a number of art opportunities in the New Year that I would like to make the most of, so I have a lot of work to do between now the resumption of classes in mid-January.

I had some interesting classes for my final week, including one in which I learnt how to code. I doubt Microsoft will be headhunting me anytime soon, however, I did manage to ask the computer to draw a face and some squiggly lines.

And in another class about sensory access to the imagination, I painted while listening to Spanish poetry – an exercise I thoroughly enjoyed.

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Experiments, Green, Painting, Reading Group, Week in Review

A family crisis descended this week, yet, despite the chaos, I managed to keep up with my coursework and painting practice, and even made some progress. Here is a rundown of what I have been up to this week:

I have been loving the switch to a green pallet. It’s a very satisfying colour to paint with, and has plenty of scope for exploration. I am just painting small ‘acrylic on paper’ works, but hope to scale-up to large canvases once I have a handle on the pallet, and a better idea of the direction I want to go in. So far, I have found green to be a much better representative of “underwater/underground” than blue, and I like that it has a darker, more mysterious vibe. Here are a couple of successful paintings from this week:

As well as painting with green, I have been reading all about it in two wonderful colour books my sister bought me. I highly recommend both books; they really get the juices flowing regarding colour.

I have been settling into my new studio, and it now feels like home. It functions well for both of the painting projects I have on-the-go at the moment. One being the experimental underground/water paintings, as mentioned above, and the other, one of my big oil paintings (working title “Ann”) that I will go into more detail about at a later stage. Both require different things from a studio space, and I am now able to move between the two with ease.

I had book club (not the naughty one) again this week. This time we had a Ted Chiang reading “The Evolution of Human Science“. To be honest, I found it a bit confusing. It was written in the form of a scholarly, scientific article, and I wasn’t sure if it was fiction or not (which I’m guessing was the author’s aim), and which I was pleased to discover was, because it was about meta-humans superseding humans, and making the latter irrelevant. I also discovered that the reading group I have joined is a “post-humanist” one. I am not sure that I am a post-humanist, mostly because I don’t understand what post-humanism is. But, the other people in the group are clever and interesting, so I think I’ll keep going.

According to the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia:

Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control.

Naturally, I am still none the wiser.

My drawing class this week was cancelled, I’m guessing due to the teacher strikes. However, here is something I drew in last week’s class on light and shade.

Despite how stressful the last week has been, 3 things have brought me great solace:

  1. Painting (naturally)
  2. My amazing, kind-hearted, supportive, patient, generous, capable (an undervalued but bloody fantastic quality), cute as a baby animal, and extremely funny boyfriend;
  3. Seeing Fonzie.

Seriously, watch this video and just see if all your troubles don’t melt away:

Wait for it..

Title quote: Sun Tzu

Water Water Everywhere

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Week in Review

One of the requirements of the Central Saint Martins’ MFA programme, is selecting a research subject – i.e., an avenue of intellectual and artistic enquiry that will be the subject of one’s dissertation and body of work produced while on the course. Broadly, the topic I have chosen is water. I am particularly interested in humanity’s relationship with water, be it historical, religious, emotional, practical, political, or future implications etc. I have swung my net wide to begin with but, eventually, I will likely focus on a particular aspect.

For this reason, my focus this week (as in the coming weeks) has been water related. Practically, I have been experimenting further with the rain painting technique I employed for last week’s assignment (as below).

Bodjal fliaghee (rain cloud) – gouache on paper

I found this week’s experiments very frustrating. I like some of the results but, overall, I prefer the original painting (above). I used the same techniques this week, all except leaving the paintings out in the rain. Instead, I painted on some old pour paintings (where I’d poured watery acrylic paint on paper). I am now wondering if leaving them in the rain is the missing ingredient. So, before abandoning this line of enquiry completely, I’ll continue with the experiments next week and include the rain aspect – fortuitously, it is due to rain every day! So, we’ll see what happens.

Here are this week’s offerings:

As far as research is concerned, I am reading a wonderful book about water at the moment – Elixir: a human history of water by Brian Fagan. It is proving to be a brilliant starting point for my research, and I am finding it utterly fascinating. Here is a particular nugget I liked:

“History teaches us that the societies that last longest are those that treat water with respect, as an elixir of life, a gift from the gods. We seem to have forgotten this compelling lesson.”

pg: xxvii