pencil
charcoal
ink
watercolor
acrylic paint
butter, fat, oils, lard
Making traditional, average works and then adding materials to them which create unexpected outcomes, and change the work in some way.
I have chosen charcoal as my first material to work with.
I'm interested in the way that materials create an artwork on their own, in a way, or at least they lend a self made quality to the work. Charcoal smudges and smears, and creates dust, which adds unintentional marks to the paper. When i do my usual work (traditional painting and drawing) I feel like i have a lot of control in terms of the outcome of the image, but using a medium like charcoal means that the material itself is more in control of the final outcome. Secondly, i added butter to my drawings. Smearing an oily, fatty substance like butter blends in with the pencil and charcoal.
PROCESS NOTES:
when i make art, i first have to have an experience.
i think of my memories, feelings, etc.
i go by everything i think, feel, believe, value, see, desire, touch, have experienced, etc.
i collect images that are similar to/ evoke and strengthen memories i have of things that have happened, or that visualize the feeling / experience i want to portray.
Ideas:
Charcoal into powder
Charcoal in centre of paper, fold paper
Tip water over it
Swirl paint into charcoal
Peg drawing on line
Blast powder with dryer
Draw on concrete
Rub over textured paper (frottage)
Erase
EXPERIMENTS
pencil and butter
charcoal
The smudging on the right of this drawing i found quite captivating, how it added to the image and how the smudges trail off out of the picture. I thought it gave the sense that anyone could pick up some charcoal and carry the drawing on.
charcoal and paint
the way the charcoal mixed with the acrylic paint and the texture it created was actually kind of irritating because i had perceived and wanted a different outcome that i thought mixing paint with charcoal would achieve, but the charcoal wont properly mix in and rub in with the paint to create the kind of seamless texture i was going for- the charcoal, when mixed with the paint and also butter, gets almost stuck and wont blend properly.
Pastel and charcoal, charcoal and water,
charcoal and paint, charcoal dust. The charcoal is a material that can transform and look quite different depending on what is done to it and also what other materials are added to it.
NOTES about my general ideas and art practice:
Truth. Connection.
the driving force and aim behind all my art work is to try to tell truths about life- my own experiences, and my understanding of others experiences.
in the world we live in that has become in my opinion dominated and clouded over by wrongful ideas, beliefs, actions etc, particularly in western society- i believe that art is possibly the most powerful tool we have to elicit change.
my aim through all my art is to present images of experiences i have had and others i know have had, universal experiences, in total, unadulterated honesty, in the hope that people will be confronted with or realize things they have suppressed. I believe that a kind of enlightenment- in terms of real, kind of pure goodness i guess, and actual honesty, is needed in human beings. In society we have become false, and we live so many lies- we have come to believe that we must wear a sort of mask, which we fabricate ourselves, in order to be considered acceptable by society's standards, but these masks hide our true selves and our individual pain, and are built on empty, superficial outer factors- societal idea of success, physical appearance, material possessions, our professions, all the things of the world that we use to construct an identity to live through.
human beings are fragile and vulnerable and at our cores, we are basically all the same and we all need many of the same things- things you can't see. you can see materials though- see them, touch them, maybe hear them. my exploration at the moment is to try and figure out how materials come into this.
i realize the problem within this is the issue of representation, and the fact that a mere artwork cannot fully, wholly show or make the viewer understand the exact experience of someone else.
materials are what makes an artwork come into existence, visually and physically at least. are materials more the key to art than the subject matter?
can the materials better aid in the accurate representation of a feeling, experience, thing?
im interested in the ideas of several artists whose work deals with materiality (in drawing)- karla black, yves klein, jenny saville and monika weiss.
jenny savilles painting work- says of her own work that the paint itself is like pots of flesh.
of drawing, she uses the medium because she feels it enables her to express things more quickly than painting.
MORE EXPERIMENTS:
Looking just at the material qualities of charcoal
Charcoal crushed into a powder
Charcoal and food coloring
Pastel and charcoal
Charcoal smudged
Charcoal on stone
Charcoal mark on ground outside
The same mark, several days later. I wanted to see what would happen to the charcoal after being left exposed to the elements- wind, rain, sun etc.
The very first lot of experiments was basically just making average drawings/ sketches to see what the charcoal felt like to use in the making of an artwork, but as i went on i realized i wasn't exploring the actual material and its qualities/ possibilities at all, which prompted me to make the above experiments. I particularly liked the first one- crushed charcoal- purely because of the look and feel and quality it produced, a very fine, dense powder. I find it intriguing how charcoal smudges no matter how careful you are with it and that it always leaves a smudge, always leaves proof of its existence no matter how much you try to erase it. The charcoal that was marked on the ground and then left over a period of days was very interesting to me and i found the result (the mark after it had been exposed to the elements) to be weirdly moving. The charcoal after it had been left out looked exactly like the the concrete it was on- a collection of smudges and stains from the elements, dirt, etc, and the charcoal blended in to this so you almost couldn't tell it wasn't originally part of the concrete.
Artist Karla Black has said of her work that she is not interested in any connotations or relationship to language her materials have (she uses bath bombs, make up and plaster among other things), but the raw material itself and the colors, and the creativity within that. I have always had immense trouble understanding or caring about materials at all (because i didn't understand them or their importance) and i still have very little understanding of process. Karla Black goes on to say that she feels that art, when completely reduced, is about basic human drives.
No comments:
Post a Comment