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- May 20, 2024
A screenshot of my current Pinterest board, where I keep visual references to inspire my work. Interesting patterns, textures, and images!
This is the next stage of my canvas piece. I decided to paint a smooth gradient between the green to pink, which attempts to suggest it’s painted digitally. The large wavy element is purposely flexible in what it suggests, either a curious hand reaching out (Like running your hand through grass to feel the environment), or an abstract tree slowly growing towards the sky.
At the moment, these elements aren’t working together, I think it’s the varying thickness of line, and amount of content. It’s busy, and my eye isn’t sure how each element connects with each other. My weakness with artworks is usually when to stop, as I like the idea of being spontaneous and not knowing where the work is going, but this can result in overworking a piece. Alternatively, if it’s too calculated, it ruins the organic process, and the work ends up visually predictable. Especially when the content is nature and the landscape, there needs to be an element of spontaneity to reflect its overwhelming scale, unpredictable growth, and how each plant is unique.
Here I painted the entire green section with a pastel pattern, with shapes that reflect those in nature. In the end, I didn’t enjoy it! It was too busy, and considering I was suggesting a landscape, the pattern looked like a flat collage piece, which is the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve.
I decided to paint over it again in green, and will either draw a pastel illustration, or just keep it clean.
The final form! Despite me continuing to overwork the piece, I think it has something to say. It looks like a digital dream of a landscape, but chopped into sections, as if the dream is lost yet these fleeting moments remain. The yellow adds further graphic value, representing spring/summertime suggestive of daffodils, the sun, bees etc.
I don’t think this will go in my space for the final show, but it has given me the technical knowledge to create a more refined idea that is visually more connected with the viewer. I'm thinking of scrapping the comic panel idea, as this added another layer of visual language that only confuses the messaging of the piece. The next piece will be more transparent in depicting a landscape, perhaps using the bottom of the canvas as the horizon line to resemble the skeletal shape of landscape (Ground/sea, and the sky).
- May 17, 2024
One of my fellow artists had these fired, white earthenware tiles from a previous project, and decided to give them to me! They are perfect for exploring a pixelated artwork in ceramic form. However, I'm drawing on them to resemble broken pottery pieces.
Broken pottery shards that have been lost to time, and dug up like artefacts, hold a rich energy containing stories and history of where it's been, and who was in possession of it. There is a project called 'Fragment Found', established in 2021 by artist Eva Jack. It is an ever-growing online catalogue of broken pottery shards. It's an open resource where the public can submit their own finds, which encourages collaboration and exchange of stories to establish community and mutual growth.
"The aim is to build a community which centres around the joy of collecting, identifying and sharing mysterious pieces of history, which would otherwise remain undocumented."
Fragment Found, 2024. (https://fragmentfound.com/archive/)
This is what is inspires me, and hope to recreate in these small ceramic pieces. With all the history it holds, it has developed a character that makes it materialistic and valuable. Interestingly, the collections project birthed a related artistic project, which takes some of the pieces to be reworked into larger, imaginative reproductions of what the pattern may have looked like. Lost histories are pieced together and reconstructed with fictional narratives from a modern understanding, told through the object function and design.
I'm using my DIY underglaze crayons, testing them out on these tiles. With how small they are, I'm just playing with shape, colour, and patterns, which will be pieced together once glazed and fired. On some I've drawn very abstract representations of the world around me, as shown below. They are naive, and do not directly signify what it represents.
Decorative, architectural design
Eyes
Castle walls
Chimneys
A landscape slope
I'm glazing these in clear again, as I want the attention on the design. I hope they come out glossy, and the drawing doesn't get lost against the white.