When completing my life drawings I added details and depth using alcohol markers which have a tendency to bleed through the paper, so I was only using half of the paper in my sketchbook and thought it could be interesting to incorporate these reverse drawings into some abstract creations. I think they were very productive and helped translate into my later paintings.
To begin my studio practice 5 and get ideas flowing I spent a week producing a collection of figure drawings. I understand this is very different to my work up until this point but I have always intended to gain some practice in figure drawing as I feel to succesfully create abstraction of bodily matters it is important to first understand more traditional bodily representations. I stuck to quite bold and bright colours and less traditional artist materials such as gel pens and gel crayons to see what inspiration might be sparked by these formal relations.
From this point on all of the posts below are from my Studio Practice Four
Here is a small collection of photographs that I have taken throughout this module that I felt provoked some thoughts, had interesting compositions or had unusual imagery and that I thought could be useful for some collaging or digital edits.
These are the sketchbook drawings I completed that I would consider not successful. There are a number of reasons I was not happy with the outcome of these, some of them are simply unfinished because I was not feeling like I was getting anywhere with them, others I was experimenting and trying different levels of figuration vs abstraction and felt the outcome was not productive. Many of them I don’t like because they feel stunted and forced, possibly because I was working to get out of a creative rut, regardless I don’t think of any of them as time wasted because figuring out what kind of process I don’t like is just as important as figuring out what methods I enjoy.
The Pink Circles series is a collection of mixed media screen prints, for the screen print I used a range of techniques to make stencils with interesting textures. One of the most visually interesting was using glue and sprinkling talcum powder over the top to create a speckled texture, I also made use of ripped paper, oil sticks and photography. I included collaged pieces of previous prints and clips from magazines. I particularly enjoyed using a highlighter over the top of a textured screen printed section as the ink resisted the screen printed parts. The first three of this series i would consider complete and successful.
These last two prints from the series are ones that I would consider to be somewhat incomplete or have some room for improvement. Pink Circle 4 is incomplete to me in the sense that it is lacking something and has gaps that I’m not happy with. Pink Circle 5 feels incomplete in that it is a bit too chaotic and doesn’t feel fully refined in my head because its fairly illegible, to improve on this I would go back over some part with either collage or a white pen and mask over some areas to reign it back and possibly leave some of the previous layers visible so it’s not completely getting rid of some parts but making them less in the foreground.
The Pink Circle series is a concept that came to me when I began to think more abstractly about gender stereotypes and how they are enforced in our society. I wanted to capture an essence of rebellion and rejection of femininity that is imposed on many things unnecessarily. I definitely consider this to have been an overall success and a key development in my artistic practice. Christina Quarles’ work on queer bodies in dramatic convoluted poses and the colour palette she uses to achieve this sense of all things weird and wonderful was definitely something that pushed forward my ideas and helped develop my ideas into an informed series of prints.
Here are some of my experimental drawings that I consider to be fairly successful but not entirely. Some of them I like certain elements but dislike other parts. The first image I consider somewhat successful because I like the use of framing; I used the stencil from my jigsaw lino cut to create a negative space which I used as my canvas and though not entirely happy with the outcome I want to attempt more drawings with a similar premise but with better execution. Others I think were too chaotic without enough personal references for my liking and some were too literal.
As a starting point for some drawings or to get me out of a creative rut, I often get my partner to draw on my back using her finger and I translate this on to paper with my eyes closed, this often sparks some form of creativity in me with the randomness of the lines and shapes it creates. I like to draw back into these later and pick out any interesting sections and turn them into the foundations for more detailed drawings.
Below are some example of drawings that began as back drawings but I then worked them to complete a more finished piece of work
Gen (VY) is a jigsaw Lino cut that I submitted for the Hot Bed Press 20×20 print exchange. I referenced from my sketchbook the drawings/collages that I titled ‘Resist’ and ‘Bite’. I kind of drew inspiration from The Rocky Horror Picture Show which i consider a staple of queer and transgender culture. I tried to capture the films flamboyant representation of the macabre and then contradicted this with relatively bright and cheerful colours interjected with a deep red which can be seen as a fairly romantic and sexualised colour but is also associated with feelings of anger and danger. Before taking my stencil in to uni and printing it, I wanted to have a clear idea of what colours I planned to use so I did a quick print of it entirely in black and then did some quick edits trying out different colours.
These are the sketchbook drawings that I am most happy with and that sparked the most interest and further ideas. Through careful layering or collage and a variety of textures I feel they are all generally ‘complete’ feeling and many of which have spurred other more refined ideas through the use of print and larger scale works. ‘Bite’ and ‘Resist’ inspired my lino cut ‘gen’ and I developed ‘Filter’ into my lino cut ‘The Binary Filter’, these are all quite personal and technical prints. I have been finding quite a rhythm in creating drawings without any prior expectations and the outcomes are pretty much 50/50 whether I like them or not but that is to be expected from experimenting and I’m hoping the more I do the less unsuccessful results I will get. ‘Resist’ is the first image I created where I decided to include limbs and direct references to the body (rather than my usual coded and much more subtle bodily references), this was inspired by Christina Quarles use of disjointed limbs and distortion of the body, I felt this experiment was very fruitful and created a composition that I was happy with whilst also still being abstracted enough for my liking as not to be creating figurative work.
Bite
Resist
Head
