I got a bit of time in the studio today, which was nice. It’s the end of the year at work and the terminal exhibitions are taking up a lot of my time, so being in the studio feels especially precious at the moment. I’m also conscious that I’m going on holiday for a fortnight after exhibition week, which means I’m very aware that I need to use the time that I do have quite carefully.
It also means that I need to start thinking about things I can do outside the studio. That feels useful, but also slightly dangerous. I’ve been really enjoying the feeling of just messing around in the studio, and I don’t want to get back on the computer in a way that tightens everything up again too quickly. There’s something valuable in the looseness at the moment, even if I don’t totally know what it is yet.
I’m going to dump a load of pictures here. Nothing is resolved. A few weeks ago, I made an assortment of test pieces to see how masking would work on various less permanent surfaces. They were never intended to be left this long but the answer is: surprisingly well. I thought the greyboard would never cope, but it seems to be absolutely fine. This is useful because it gives me a relatively cheap surface for experiments, and today I did some more work with those test pieces in a fairly carefree way.
I have basically abandoned my study statement at this point. Or at least, I’ve abandoned the idea that it currently describes what I’m doing with any real accuracy. I’m just going to make stuff through the summer. I do still think I have a project, even if I’m not convinced by the articulation of it at the moment. Maybe that’s okay. I think I need to make some work in parallel with writing the research paper and then see where I am in September.
One of the pictures below is of an image being projected onto the studio wall. As a consequence of the Spectrum exhibition, I’ve become quite taken with the idea of experimenting with painting directly onto the wall and then hanging paintings on top of it. There’s something about that layering that feels promising. It makes the wall more active, and it also changes the status of the paintings, because they’re no longer just sitting politely in front of a neutral background.
I’m going to experiment with painting on the studio wall and then hanging or arranging canvases on top. I should also play around with varying the size of the canvases, rather than assuming they all need to behave in the same way. Projecting the image has also made me wonder what would happen if I started experimenting with moving images. Could there be an arrangement of canvases with an animation projected over them? I’m not sure, but it feels like something worth testing.
My little projector isn’t amazing, though. I had to drag it right to the other end of the studio to get a reasonably large image, and even then it was difficult to get it properly in focus. I’m going to make some acetates and try the OHP that I bought from eBay this week. If that doesn’t work, it might be time for a projector upgrade.
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