All finished! My work all displayed in my studio space ready for assessment tomorrow morning. Resolved work, of which there’s quite a lot, two oil paintings (four, including two on the floor, only one labeled), a watercolour painting, a set of six ceramic tiles, a series of six unstretched canvas squares on a washing line, my Rubatosis collage/poem piece, documentation of my performance, including the mask and shorts, a sculpture, a portfolio of prints, (more than I had originally intended to be finished work and not just trying out ideas) including sketchbooks, my CV, artists statement and self-evaluation form. I get a lot of satisfaction out of having to finish and present a project/body of work including sketchbooks of the whole process when I have been used to often starting and stopping projects in a chaotic and disorganised way and without any proper research or process of development, when left to my own devices.
I have started researching other artists and thinking about future projects. I have been watching James Kalm’s documentary series of painters in New York again and have discovered three interesting artists who either inspire ideas in me or directly connect to my work.
Susan Te Kahurangi King, an outsider artist who works in a completely intuitive way, in graphite or coloured pencil or a mixture. Covering any paper surface in explosions of connecting lines that are a mixture of abstact shape doodles, cartoon figures and other figures or body parts. Makes me think of collaging my doodles/intuitive line drawings/shadow symbols in a big spiraling shape that leaves the edges of the paper. Maybe collaging within or on top of my landscapes or other paintings. Maybe stitch the paper shapes on to the canvas, include canvas cut outs form old paintings – or deliberately painted canvas scraps and other fabric cut outs.
A painter, Jim Herbert, who makes large very painterly, thickly textured sexually explicit scenes. But not in a photorealistic way, in a very fleshy, organic, messy way which is very visceral and makes me slightly queasy to look at. I t cannot be discerned where the flesh, clothes and the ground they are placed on begin or end, they are all whipped up together in a primordial marbled oil paint slime which appeals to my ideas of human and animal sexuality being so close. There are no satin sheets, sexy underwear, coquettish looks or cleaned up flesh in these paintings, they are raw, dirty, base, animal and disgusting in their explosion of fluids and genital sucking.
The third artist is a woman, Paulina Peavy, who wore different masks, while painting, to conjure up spirits who she believed to carry out the paintings, working through her. She made the masks herself and they are works of art in their own right, with fabric and buttons and bits of costume jewelry sewn together. Her paintings are what look like wet on wet watercolour or ink made, organic shapes, where the paint does the creating, rather than a brush, overlaid with very precise black geometric lines and large matt areas of black in something like gouache. Creating abstract, very pleasing cosmic looking realms. I would like to try this technique but with more figurative subject matter. Maybe trying watercolour with some kind of printing on top, like screen painting in one colour, maybe black.
Rachel Bride Ashton 