Tag: colour

Falling into green

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Experiments, Green, Interim Show, Painting, Research Project, Research Study Statement

Picasso was a horror when it came to women, but his insights into painting were spot on – like this:

Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.

or this:

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

I am particularly interested in this second insight at the moment, due to my recent colour change from blue to green. Blue has always felt like a safe, knowable colour to me, which is why I typically used it when experimenting. But green – it is completely different. I don’t yet know its boundaries, or what its emotional resonance will be on a large scale. On a small scale, it feels mysterious and other-worldly, if not a little bit spooky. When I paint with its darker tones (as above), I am reminded of a time when I was a child, in a boat on the edge of a lake. I remember looking deeply into the water which rippled and swirled with tones of impossibly dark green that merged into unknowable inky darkness. I was completely captivated. Even though I was only a small child, probably no more than 5 or 6, I knew I would never forget what I was seeing, and so I never have.

The above picture, which I found on the internet, is the exact colour/visual I remember. Looking at it, even with its poor resolution, I have the same sensation of wanting to fall into its depths. What a truly mysterious colour. However, the trouble with this shade of green is, it doesn’t really go with anything else (perhaps because it is perfection in and of itself), so it would not really be suitable for the figurative painting/s I have in mind for the Interim Show (although, never say never).

One thing is certain, if I am going to paint with green, I have to get it right, or I will end up with a garish mess that no one will want to look at. To avoid this pitfall, I have set myself the task of creating a suitable palette, so I’ll have a better chance of getting it right when it comes to the final work/s.

“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