So, my plan has already gone a bit off-piste! I had said that I wasn’t going to use the small canvases straight away, but that’s exactly what I’ve ended up doing.
I’ve been trying to work out what to make for the Tavistock exhibition. I’m going down to London that week, so I can take something with me rather than sending a print. I was initially thinking about making something on paper that I could roll up, but I wasn’t sure how practical that would be with the hanging system. When we received the hanging document last week, it became clear that Command hooks are allowed, which immediately made the small canvases feel like a much more viable option.
The plan now is to make the previously planned group of small test paintings on canvas rather than cardboard, and then hang a selection of them together as one piece. I started last week, working quickly and fairly instinctively. It was actually enjoyable to just mess around a bit without overthinking it too much. I put a selection of the works in progress up on the Miro board for the crit on Thursday, and the response was pretty positive.
I’m also using paint that was originally mixed for the paintings I made for the show earlier this year. A surprising amount of it is still usable, so this feels like a good way of using some of it up rather than letting it go to waste. It also functions as an interesting constraint. Instead of starting with a completely open set of choices, I’m working from a palette that already exists and has a connection to a previous body of work. That gives the new paintings a practical limit, but also creates a kind of continuity between the earlier work and this new group.
The mix-and-match nature of the work also feels like a further test of some of the project’s ideas around iteration and versioning. Each small painting can operate as an individual work, but they can also be rearranged, selected from, and reconfigured into different combinations. That might be useful in relation to the wider research, particularly the question of how images shift when they are repeated, varied, grouped, or placed into different systems.
I won’t be able to work on the paintings this week, as I’m going down to London once my teaching commitments are finished. That should still give me four or five days in the studio next week. I’ll see what I can make in that time, then choose a selection to take down for the exhibition.
Some work-in-progress pictures:
Leave a Reply