Exhibition Night

Personal Highlights of the Show

Formalities of Exhibition

Following a Visit to the Liverpool Museum i have been able to deveolp my exhibition piece.  The clinical and clean presentation of the natural samples within the museum helped to establish the approach i was looking for.

Aligned Butterflies

The is a mock up of my exhibition space however instead of the card circles will be my casts and the board will be along a flat wall.  This really helped me to actually visualise the space and realise that i need to make a few adjustments.

These are the starts of the casts i will be displaying in a similar way to the display itself.  They are individual casts of textured surfaces i have found and discovered within Rixton Clay Pits.

Final Major Project

Recording Nature with a clinical approach

My Final Major Project shall feature this title and form the basis for my exploration.  Simply i intend to do this through the exploration of photography, preservation and casting; keeping a clean, clinical and sanitised approach running throughout.

The following are just a couple of the initial snapshots taken within Rixton Claypits and Nature Reserve; the source of my inspiration...

Stopping Time

The Concept:

The Initial Stage was to think of an aspect relating to time that you wanted to further explore.  My Initial thought was to look into vintage and second-hand clothing and the time in which it gets passed down from owner to owner and the stories it tells as a result of this.  I then however started looking through old photographs i have of my mum and grandparents and the clothes they were wearing however became more interested in the photographs themselves.  I therefore changed my initial starting point to be the range of photos that i have found and in particular the colours within them. 

As the aspect to be exploring in this project is painting and as i have never really painted with oils before, i thought a key aspect and starting point to my work would be the surfaces i would be painting onto.  I therefore decided to create very textured surface that would match some of the earthy textures in the photographs and become something to further explore.

These are the surface swatches i created exploring the different surfaces i could make with the materials i had available to me

Close-up of the Surface Swatches

As a result of not knowing how oils work and how to use them, i thought it would be essential to start exploring their properties and how to mix the colours i would be needing.  So i created these colour charts trying to mix the colours that appear in some of my photographs.

What i thought would just be a simple yet essential development stage in my work ... actually turned out to be very unique small pieces of work in themselves

I then at that stage tried painting with the oils onto my surfaces to ensure the oil paints would actually paint onto all of the different surfaces i had created initially ... which they did

Close-up of the surface swatches with samples of colours

Once i had explored surface and created the initial colour swatches, i decided to further develop the painting aspect by focusing on one particular image at a time.  In order to do this i split an image into 1cm squares and exploded the outwards onto paper.  This allowed me to further analyse the colours within the image.

What i felt would be something to work from and produce work on as a result of it's existance ... actually turned out to be an idea that i could decide to further develop within itself.

This is one of the exploded images 

Once viewed from further away ... each square shows an individual colour that is coming through more than the others.  This then gave me the idea to take the prodominant colour from each square and re-produce this colour in paint to paint the image ... but in a different way

This is a colour chart showing my experiments of mixing the colours for the images

This is the first painting.  Working onto book paper with PVA as a base and the squares apart from one another

These are the second and third paintings i produced on Graph Paper with PVA as a primer.  Experimenting with the same colours and background but different sizes of coloured squares

The outcomes i feel slightly resemble pixelated versional of the origional image

My Studio space at the end of the week

My Studio space at the end of the week