Painting Elective.

Its the weekend already and the first week in painting is gone.   Wow that was fast.   On Monday we all spoke about the images on our boards.   We also had a slide show that showed the work of Contemporary Artists.    On Tuesday we were given a brief to pick a 2d or 3d work of art and to respond to it in the form of an installation.   This was to be ready by Thursday.   On Tuesday afternoon we did a painting work shop where we did a blind painting exercise, painting with card and painting the negative spaces.    I found it hard to get my head around painting the negative spaces but overall I enjoyed the workshop a lot.

Wednesday saw most of us trying to put our response to our work of art together.   I picked Henry Moore's 'Mother and Child with petal skirt' as my subject and this is how I responded to it.  

I used tin foil, tumble dryer pipe and stocking in the construction of this piece, what I wanted to convey was the unbroken link between the mother and child, the chord and how as a mother you never really cut that bond or link.  Of course physically it happens at birth but emotionally and mentally its always there, I suppose that's love.   Anyway this is far too deep, easily known its the middle of the night and I can't sleep.   However my construction was too sculptural, and not interesting enough to paint, so I responded again, this time to the pleating element and this is what happened.  
Contextually I was looking at the work of Thomas Hirschhorn.

Here I used brown paper, tin foil and various types of chord and string.   I pleated the paper and used it to build a structure out from the wall.   My first installation.

On Friday we had the best fun yet, we were to interpret our installation in paint.  We did blind paintings of it first, then thumb nails of the areas we wanted to paint.   We were using palette knives and our colour palette was a self mixed black with four other tints of the colour blended with white.   It got somewhat frustrating when the paint wouldn't do what I wanted it to do, but it didn't take from the fun of it.   This is what happened, my two finished results.

My homework for the weekend is to copy a Lucien Freud portrait colour for colour, brush stroke for brush stroke, sounds like fun doesn't it.   Not sure my attempt will be very Freudesk but tune in to see what happens. I promise I will post my appropriation whatever happens!