A Week Of Completion

Repose With Collage | Acrylic, Wood Veneer and Collaged Photos on Calico.

Repose Inverted | Acrylic on Calico.

Transparent Repose | Acrylic on Calico.

It's been a pretty busy week for me as it's coming to the close of the first semester which means I'm scrambling to get all my work together for hand in. Having said that, this week has been super productive as I have finally finished my 2,500 word essay and completed three paintings.

I had so many ideas which emerged from past group critiques that I really wanted to test out so I decided to make a series of paintings based on 'Repose'; a still life acrylic painting I did earlier in the module. I bought myself three canvas' and started to reconstruct a different version of Repose on each one. For the first painting I collaged wood veneer and photographs of leaves onto the surface to produce a contrast between the more fabricated areas of paint and the realistic pieces of collage. With the second painting I reversed the sections of flat colour with the areas of gestural brush strokes. In doing this the background became much more expressive in tone whilst the subject maintained flat simplistic shapes. The third painting was an experiment with thickness of paint where I used a thinner mix of acrylic to build up transparent layers so that the bottom grounds became more visible. 

All three have their positives and their negatives. I love the wood veneer and the gestural background as it creates a sense of depth but I am not so keen on the transparent paint or the subject being flat shapes of colour because it becomes simplified and too dull for my taste. My favourite from the whole series is the original Repose painting because I love the colours, composition and balance of the flat blocks of colour in contrast to the expressive areas of the subjects. However, from doing these paintings I really want to concentrate on bringing more collage back into my work especially the wood veneer as I found it exciting to work with. 

In addition to the first three experiments I also painted a few abstract close ups of Repose to see what an enlarged version of the sections would look like. I used a view finder to select a small square of the painting which I then recreated on a larger scale and these are the results of this process. It gave me the chance to play around with scale and how increasing it can affect the visual result of the painting, however I didn't enjoy doing this as much as my full scale still life as I prefer to paint the whole picture where I can focus more on depth within a composition. I rely on the negative space surrounding a still life to balance out the different shapes; the close ups are overly busy and like my painting from summer (Untitled) there is too much going on to portray the harmonious atmosphere I am wanting.