Tag: Reflection

Reflection “in” and “on” action

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Making the Ephemeral Eternal

I have started to work on a new piece. It portrays a mature Thai lady, who is naturally talented at playing the pool. She is rich. Her body is dripping in golden jewellery and adornments. Her supporting team celebrate her successes and support her in every possible way.

When aiming at a ball, her body position is bizarrely stretched, resembling an ancient Mayan warrior – immaculately dressed in white, with a serious facial expression and flowers in her hair. This appears to be contradictory to the time-typical technique and makes it very difficult to calculate precise directions of the shot and predict the associated geometry of angles and forces.

This unusual ritual is repeated every night.. Many people depend on her performance and the related income.

I am working directly on a large scale unprimed canvas. The red colour scheme is gradually evolving to enhance my overall creative intention to portray a theatre and show of mastery of skill and class.

This is the first layer of colour and glaze, and the process of development will continue. I am currently working hard to develop images for a screen to be used for overprinting this under image.

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Postcards

To support my participation in the African Art Exhibition, I have designed a postcard size piece. It contains a good quality photograph of my work on the front. On the back, I decided to categorise the information as follows:

1. Explanation of the meaning of the painting.

2. Artist statement.

3. Details of my email, WordPress blog, Instagram and Behance portfolios.

50 copies of my design will be printed back to back and doubled on A4 photo card. When cut in half, this will create 100 A5 postcard type of information. The idea is to explain and promote my work.

The text itself is in grey to increase the sophistication of the design without impacting it’s clarity and readability.

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Coach to Meek – Final

I have reached a point of saturation.  The composition is dynamic and vibrant, ambiguous and full of intriguing detail.  The painted and drawn over-layers focus on revealing light in order to increase drama in the work.  The driver becomes almost secondary.  The bustling components have totally overwhelmed his importance.  Nothing ever changes.

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Coach to Myiek – Developments

I spent the entire morning exploring possibilities for development.  The idea was to establish a meaningful plan and introduce a range of quality improvements to the colour arrangement and the overall scheme.

The image needed something warmer, perhaps contrasting, in order to introduce a source of soft light within the composition.  I wanted to achieve this through continuous printing on top of a semi wet surface of existing colour and sponging of the excess of patterns.

This seems to have an impact on how the colour behave with reference to my creative intentions.  The drive is totally suspended in vacuum and oblivious to his surroundings.  He is focused on a tedious task of sorting bits and bobs, which may be useful in case of an unexpected breakdown.

I feel that the composition, at this stage, has more impact through layering and the use of watered down transparencies.

The final stage will involve careful highlighting and building up detail using water soluble pastels.

driver 3

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Coach to Myiek – Refinements

I have initiated a process of overprinting the already established under image. To reflect the overwhelming presence of insects in the South of Myanmar, I continued to work with the screen portraying a swarm of bees. The printing started with a number of layers in rich and vibrant blues. This imagery was subsequently washed off with sponges and a powerful water jet.  Due to the hight temperature in the workshop, I had to aid this with robbing off the ink with hard brushes.

The second layer involved a range of strokes using a dynamic crimson alizarin based colour. I used both the screen and just a squeegee to drag the ink across. A careful process of removing the glaze followed in preparation for the next stage of partial overprinting and glazing.

Following a completion of this stage, I plan to return to painting with small brushes and using water solvable crayons in order to refresh some important elements of the composition and introduce highlights to liven the entire colour scheme.

The refinement process continuous.

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Everything Will Pass

Even the longest journey will come to an end. Nothing lasts forever. It is so difficult to embrace this concept, while engaging in critically analysing life and attempting to understand its wonders. Every trip starts and ends. What is important is the concept. What is left is the experience of travelling and many associated memories.

I am trying to reflect on life of the coach driver in Burma. The tiredness, waiting, uncertainty and anticipation . All of this in order to return back to the place of origin before restarting the adventure again. Is every trip the same? Has the routine and work experience overtaken the exploration of the unknown road ahead. Or… is it simply just entrapped in the vacuum of repetitive hypnosis of life. This is all, perhaps best summarised by the above phrase from a book by the most recent Nobel Prize winner – Olga Tokarczuk.

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Coach To Myiek

I have move forward with my project. This is just a preview of the first stage of my new piece. It portrays a coach driver in preparation for leaving Kawthoung for a 20 hour long journey to Myiek. The road is terrible and unpredictable. His old coach must be in a top condition before the passengers are allowed to board.

The driver looks very tired and substantially overweight. He spends his life driving his coach between those two distant cities in Myanmar.

In response to my discussions concerned with a range of ethical issues in my previous work, I have decided to select a rear view composition, my intention is to capture the character of the person but avoid direct recognition.

The next steps of the painting process will include glazing and overprinting. More developments are due to come soon.

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Snake Seller – Development

I have reflected on the slow process of the development and refinement of this piece.  Subsequently, I have made a decision to darken the overall image through the use of glazes and tonal overlays.  This has increased the element of drama and reinforced tiredness of the painting.  The colour scheme has become richer and more vibrant.  The intention is to echo the gloominess and monotony of daily rituals of waiting and the suspended entrapment in this cycle.  Nothing will ever change.  There is no escape.  The best result is to survive until tomorrow.

I will gradually, through careful highlighting, bring a spark of colour and light into this image.  I would like to reveal some very important details and, therefore, enhance the narrative content of this piece.

In response to my previous ethical considerations, the main character on this piece is totally anonymous.

Snake Seller 2

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Snake Seller.

Some of my thinking for this piece was inspired by learning from overpowering photographs of manufacturing by Edward Burtynsky.  My attention was particularly drawn to images of miners.

‘Manufactured Landscapes’, Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, available at https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/dpk8yw/edward-burtynsky-shows-us-impending-enviro-apocalypse-in-high-definition

I have just started to work on a new portrait of a young woman.  She is a local worker at a market in Myiek, Myanmar.  The bazaar is based next to famous hot springs.  This increases the attractiveness of this placement and maximises potential sale opportunities.  She is a snakes vendor.  She spends all her days crouching down on her knees, while waiting for prospective customers.  Although she works outdoors, her individual stall can be seen through a window-like hole in a sheet of graffitied metal.  The contrast between brown and ochre colouring of the facade, raw redness of her T-shirt and the dynamic green of the grass make an illusion of quite dramatic and full colour compositional arrangement.

Her head is decorated with a traditional Burmese turban.  She is very serious, almost contemplative and very tense.  She looks down, perhaps away, and tries to kill time by organising one of her snakes neatly in a plastic bag, always in readiness for the next sale.

She spends most of her time waiting in anticipation for a successful transaction and making a profit.  All her days are alike, full of repetition, boredom and sameness. However, competition is tough.  Sales are limited.  This makes her existence very uncertain and fills her daily life with misery and anxiety.

I am hoping to overprint this piece with a repetitive pattern to increase the power and the overall impact.  This process will be documented in stages.

snake seller

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Reflection on Kentridge

During the most recent skype session, we discussed the work of William Kentridge.  I was absolutely intrigued and fascinated by his process of repeatedly erasing and reworking charcoal drawings to create stop-frame animations.  The supporting commentary explored different ways, in which we perceive and understand the Universe.  His methodology reinforces the importance of experimentation and risk-taking; redirecting the already existing and premeditated modes of working in order to develop and refine ideas in a much more unpredictable and uncertain work.

Jonathan Kearney interpreted his work and formulated the following powerful statement:

‘Certainty can be dogmatic and arrogant, but often the perceived certainty is not very solid and the reality is much more uncertain – the value of art can be argued is in that it actively engages with uncertainty in order to discover new possibilities, ideas, surprises, etc.’

 

It is almost like Kentridge celebrates the value and preciousness of subjective interpretations of the world.

In response to my reflections, I have decided to experiment with my current ideas and develop them in a new, perhaps unplanned direction.

I have explored possibilities of imprinting marks and textures onto a photograph.  Following careful ethical consideration, I have decided to delete all visual work involved in this activity.  I found my work to be morally unsound.  I was faced with a very important issue in portrait making, an important dilemma.

Has the artist got the right to manipulate images depicting people and their mundane lives? My creative intentions were to provoke reflections and not to reveal dramatic existence of individual persons.

 

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Burmese Captain. Painterly Process – Part 3.

I have continued with the process of overprinting the underage.  The screen composition contains a sworn of exotic flies, which surrounded the boat during a long period of waiting in the port.  Following a process of robbing and washing, the captain has started to appear in the window of dynamic insects.  These create an almost decorative motif framing the figure and the umbrella.  The heat of the red is juxtaposed with the coldness the vibrant blues and rich violets.  The violet tonation appears to be neutral in temperature, not hot nor cold, therefore making the overall piece much more ‘full colour’ and with a greater impact on the viewer. The narrative has also become more ambiguous and the image gained a new element, which helps to build curiosity.

When fully dry, I plan to the cloth with damar varnish before proceeding to machine wash it on the hottest setting.

I am hoping for at least a partial disintegration of the image and substantial bleaching of the colour layers.  Ideally, there will be nothing left – just an eroded and exhausted surface.  If the first wash is insufficient in achieving this effect, I will persevere with repeating this process while echoing the journey made by the Burmese Captain and his longboat between Ranong and Kawthoung.

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Hypnotic Repetition.

The Captain appears to be oblivious to both his social predicament and his surroundings.  This is what he does every day. The same journey, non-communication with his passengers and trapped in his own world.  He not not necessarily looking for escape.  He embraces the banal repetition of his job, routine and existence.

This reflection has given me new ideas.  The focus of my investigation has slightly evolved from superficial repetition on one hand and uncertainty of existence at all on the other.  He appears to cling to that routine as it gives him a sense of certainty and security.  He believes that he knows what to expect yet works in a relatively unpredictable environment while operating an old longboat in a very uncertain territory . His real existence is very fragile and temporary. He cannot even imagine that one day, he will not be able to do it again and may not survive without an income.

I have also started to experiment by drawing into the existing image with water soluble pastels.  I have found this new to me medium flexible, refreshing and expressive.

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