First day back.

Today was nerve racking and exciting, however my nerves were calmed a little after having a group discussion with my tutor about what I plan to do with my third and final year of this course.

I will be looking at colour. I have already been looking at natural colour palettes taken from the sky, and have a vast range of photographs of sunsets and sun rises where I have been taking and selecting my colours from. Having photos has helped me to precisely mix the colours I need. With these colours I have been creating gradients of colour, blending one into the other to replicate that of the sky.

What I aim to do this year:

• firstly is to experiment with video, with the existing paintings I have have already created. Using a camera I would like to start zoomed into the centre of one of my round pieces and gently draw back introducing the surrounding colours as it moves backwards, and vice versa eliminating colours as it moves forward. Playing around with the speeds at which the camera moves in and out may or may not effect the way the colours respond with each other, also blurring may be another factor that may me interesting to explore.

video experiment 1, video experiment 2, video experiment 3

• Inspired by a fellow students work on colour, in particular her colour work on green has made me think about how we see. The human eye can see more different shades of green than any other colour due to evolution. A bbc documentary suggests and researches that the language we use to categorise colour may also make us see the world differently. The Himba tribe in Namibia have half as many words as we do to describe colours, Zoozu which are dark colours such as red blue green and purple, Vapu which is white and some yellows, Borou which is green and blue, Dumbo which contains greens reds and browns. I would like to look into this with more depth and try to fully understand it, as I think it may be a good source of inspiration for future work.

Do you see what I see documentary

• there are many artists to look at in relation to the work I am doing on colour, James Turrell uses light and the sky a lot in his work to create spaces that challenges the audience and how they see. David Batchelor explores ideas on how the decent from monochrome to colour in the modern day suggests the oriental, feminine and the seductive powers of colour. Others including Josef Albers, Mark Rothko, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerhard Richter and Robert Rauschenberg who are all important and inspiring to my work.

Now with a few starting points its now time to start getting some work done and grounding some ideas!

BRING IT ON!

Abacus Substance Exhibition. 12th – 19th December 2014

Last December a number of fellow fine art students and I came together and created an exhibition in the centre of Cardiff. We held the exhibition at a new arts venue called The Abacus which was the bus ticket office before it was converted into a gallery space. As it was once an old ticket office the layout isn’t your conventional “gallery” type layout, lots of corners and nooks and crannies, not to mention a bank vault to get our head around but we managed it and it was a huge success!

Here is a development of the work I submitted as part of the exhibition. As the name of the exhibition was Substance I decided to explore with the idea of what the world is made of what is our physical substance actually made of? We are all aware of elements such as oxygen and carbon, something we would have picked up in GCSE science is that these elements are the building blocks of all things we have yet found. We as human beings share the same type of molecular structure within animals, rocks, plants and even stars billions of light-years away. Despite being uniquely different from each other the whole of the human race and everything we know is made up of just 118 different elements. Now the reason for using dots is to show how one basic shape in 3 different colours can create one unique outcome. Although the materials are limited there can be an infinite amount of outcomes. So despite us all being made of the same “stuff” we can still say we unique and different from the stars and everything around us.

I was very happy with the end results of my work and feel it went well with the different variety of work produced by everyone else. All in all it was a success! Bring on the next one!

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Phenomenology of Experience.

In my second year phenomenal experience and the relationship between the physical reality of the world and our conscious understanding of it has been paramount within my painting development. As a painter I want to explore ideas involving visual experience and how our perception of the world around us can have a physical effect on our bodies. Understanding how the mind works when stimulated by what is around us, and how visual experience in particular stimulates conscious thought, emotions, memories and ideas has been a modern revelation within the complex world of neurology. When looking into the biological basis of how conscious thought arises, there is still no close answer to understanding what it is initially like to experience something first hand exactly the way you see it. This is the idea of Quaila – “what it feels like” to experience something. Our vivid experience of the world is the only information we have to understand reality, and it can be overwhelming at times, similar to that in the early development within babies. The babe’s senses are inundated with visual information, light and movement that has no structure or form to it, where there is little to no understanding of what any of this means. To be able to strip back visual experience to this overwhelming lack of structure and understanding, and to really immerse the viewer within a positive overwhelming experience of pure experience is my goal. Hopefully my Final Project pieces for my second year assessment convey these ideas on experience, and I am looking forward to exploring these ideas more so in my third and final year practices.