More work...it's been a busy week!

Here are two pieces I have been working on this week.  This first one is a watercolour painting that I actually started almost when I first arrived, but then we had holidays and workshops week and I never quite got it finished. So I decided I would give it a go this week. In some ways I feel I've moved on a bit in my mind now but I'd also really like to try and finish it. I started it when I was still feeling quite homesick for London so it is a painting of Jon in our London flat. My "reasoning" I gave myself was that it would be interesting to make a painting of the flat from afar. It is also a study of the light, I noticed immediately when I arrived how different the light is here to London. It is much stronger, golden almost. That is not to say that the light in London is not beautiful, indeed in the photo I am working from it is a very soft cool lemon yellow colour, here in Toulouse, it is maybe a less bashful sunlight, more forceful and all illuminating. The painting is watercolour on unprimed canvas. Unfortunately this isn't working as well as on unprimed linen. The paint doesn't saturate the canvas like it does with the linen, and leaving it unstretched has made the material buckle somewhat which is a shame. I am finding it more like working with acrylics. I think working on canvas it might actually work better to prime it because although you still don't get the saturation at least you get some very interesting uncontrollable reactions between the primer and the paint where the thickness of the primer varies.

Below is the second large A0 ink drawing that I've made this week. I wasn't sure about it when I first started, it was a less immediate picture for me than my first attempt but I was ultimately pleased with it. I think I would potentially like to try working even bigger, to see how far I could take it, and see how again the change in scale would effect the impact of the image.

 I seem to have managed to have about three "tutorial" type things in the last four days now! Which was a very pleasant surprise. Well the most recent one was a meeting with the philosophy teacher here when she making her way around the studios to see our work. I actually had a really nice chat with her, she told me that in fact her husband was English and an artist and had done his masters at Chelsea. Talking to her and realising how nice she was sort of guilted me in to going to the philosophy lesson running from 6-8pm. I may have missed it a couple of times after feeling so completely out of my depth the first time I went. I am pleased to say I did manage to understand a bit more this time, we talked about Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle-this sounds familiar... Unfortunately I didn't find it that interesting but I will keep trying! I also feel 6 o'clock on a Thursday evening is a terrible time to have a philosophy lecture! But anyway....

I also found to my interest talking to the painting tutor, that there is a student in the 5th year who is really interested in palm trees ("les palmiers") and is even (if I've understood this correctly) making portraits of them. So I intend to seek him out as soon as I can, and as soon as I can work out where the fifth year studios are. There are three floors in the school and you know what year the studios belong to depending on the floor, floor one=year one. So by this logic I have no idea where the fifth years are unless the are on the roof which wouldn't really surprise me! I'm really quite excited about the whole idea of palm trees here, the exoticism of them in the urban environment. I'm looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

French people really do wear berets! (But you have to know where to look)

The fantastic Saturday market held in Place du Capitol-with amazing (organic) food is full of beret wearing French people. I was taking this photo and the stall holder decided to strike a pose for me! Of course the berets could just be for the amusement of us tourists but I like to think they would wear them whether we were here or not!

What I did today... (Eek I wrote a lot, feel free to just look at the pictures!)

Above a drawing that I made on paper about A0 size from the sketch that I have also been using to make the woodcut, below, which I think I have finished now. In my big drawing I tried to maintain some of the manner and looseness of the original sketch, I wanted to see how the scale would change it. I'm quite pleased with the result and I'd like to perhaps do some other large ink drawings based on sketches I make and things I observe and see where this takes me. I am enjoying the motive of suburban houses interspersed with palm trees, the palm trees make even mundane suburbia seem quite exotic to me, I find them very pleasing.
I had a really helpful chat with the drawing tutor today who is called Guillame. Unfortunately he is going to be working with the 5th years from now on but I'm glad I got the chance to talk to him. In our drawing class I discovered that the ultimate aim is to make a book! This was a little bit of a surprise to me but perhaps it will be a good challenge. I had already been thinking about doing some illustrations for a short story that Jon has written and I am thinking of doing some watercolours about A3 in size in order to do that, I hope they can be quite fluid and the colours bold-though with enough white space, I would then of course photograph/photocopy them and shrink them to book-size juxtaposing them with the text. (though I haven't started this yet) I had another idea which was to make a book just of drawings of the things I have observed which have caught my eye here- "les choses qui m'ont frappé". Sketches here are called "les croquis". So I could do drawings and then transfer them to screen prints to print a series of books maybe. Anyway I showed my sketches to Guillame and he seemed interested. He said he liked the sketch that the drawing above is made from partly because of the space around it, sort of drawing you in and somehow looking quite complete. (whereas with my other sketches I had worked right to the edge of the page which gives a different intensity and makes the space quite different I guess.) He said I should think about having areas of intensity and areas that were quieter by comparison. He also suggested I try working with them to a bigger size to see what would happen. I said that I hadn't really considered the light when I made the small sketches but he said perhaps this wasn't necessary as they are studies of space essentially, so perhaps this is what I should focus on. I felt really encouraged talking to him, I'm not sure exactly what he said but I felt talking to him that there was some potential in mes croquis, I should do more, and I should try to develop them, maybe keeping them quite gestural but also considering contrasts between having areas of high detail/intensity and areas with less detail/more space. I felt quite inspired to work, having arrived at school today towards the end of this lesson that to be honest I didn't know I had and feeling a feeling a bit tired a bit uncertain I suddenly felt v.inspired to work and I did indeed feel quite productive this afternoon. Hopefully it will continue! I have another sheet of paper set up in readiness! 

Group Collaboration-skipping back a bit in time... (week of the 14th March)

First week back after our two week break was workshop week! This turned out to be surprisingly intensive for the first week back, unlike in London where I always feel we ease ourselves and each other back into working mode gradually as the days go by, here it was 9 o'clock start Monday morning and didn't end until 6-6:30-this ended up being the routine for the next four days! However it was good to be feeling productive again. My workshop was based on a group project that I have been invited to get involved in by the tutor who organises it. It consists of the students creating an installation for a space, the installation can be physical and also should involve sound. We spent the first day making drawing and maquettes. The students are interested in the relationship between interior and exterior spaces and perceptions of said spaces. The main concept is monstre/montrer-the is a similarity in the wwords for monster and the word "show" in French. So the exhibition will be based around the idea of something being monstrous I suppose. The students were originally quite interested in the idea of creating a sort of labyrynthe. Here was my maquette I made, I was really thinking about the work of Thomas Hirschhorn that I saw in the Hayward Exhibition: "Walking in My Mind" which I saw a couple of years ago. I thought hte cardboard structure was very effective as a cavernous material, it would also be a cheap and readily available material to use and less of a fire risk than plastics.

I got talking to one of the students, who said this was a good idea and got quite excited about how to construct it, suggesting a wooden frame on which to base the cardboard. However it was starting to sound a bit complicated and I was somewhat relieved when we discussed it and things seemed to be turning towards a different idea which was the making of sculptures out of masking tape. I wasn't sure about this idea at first but the forms began to look quite organic particularly after the had become a bit disheveled after sitting in the studio for a few days. I made some drawings of them incorporating them into the space, we each drew different proposals of how we thought the space could be used. The space itself is a community center and very uninspiring so I think it'll be interesting to see if the artwork is strong enough to overcome that. I would quite like to make some prints based on the work that could be distributed during the show. I need to discuss this idea with the others, but the owner of the space was quite keen on the idea of distributing drawings, she wanted to show the process, however I got the feeling that the group would prefer to keep that separate, however drawings/prints just of the forms, could work. I may make some even if it turns out they won't be distributed. So I spent a lot of time drawing on Monday, Tuesday and Friday morning. The rest of the time I spent in the sound room with a friend who had invited me to help here with the sound piece. She had made recordings of the sea and we were editing it to make a sound piece that when installed could hopefully be sufficiently scary I suppose! I didn't do that much hands on stuff with this but I hope that by giving opinions etc I was of use and it was really interesting to see how you go about mixing sounds, there are layers and I found the program quite similar to that which you use to edit animations (something I tried in my elective last term). I have a better idea of how sound works now, sound is something I never even thought I'd find out about so to have actually learned a bit of the process of editing, cutting and over-layering sounds was really great, and I now know what some (well about 4) of the little knobby bits in recording studios are for! So all in all it was a good week, we are installing it a week today and I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like. I didn't really work on it last week so I need to make sure I try to help bring everything together a bit this week. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turn out.

An example of a proposed masking tape sculpture, the sculptures are most dramatic when placed in front of the windows, the light highlights their structure.

Above, examples of other initial ideas.

Recent works...

Above are recent works, that I have made in my sketch book mainly using a trusty berol fine liner although there is one in pencil-this one took me ages, it's not really finished, I hope I can bring it to a point of being finished, I was sketching it in a cafe and exhausted myself with detail-you can prob tell where I started and where I finished. The top two are sketches I did whilst sitting by the Garonne after a picnic lunch in the sunshine, I sat with my ersamus friends, i like working with other people around me. The others are sketches made on my road-avenue de lavaur. I really like the palm tress which intersperse the concrete of the suburban houses. I also like the telegraph wires that criss cross the streets-I find them oddly quite beautiful-though so far haven't quite worked out how best to depict them. I hope to use these studies to make other works. Perhaps even just to do bigger ink drawings from them, as I find the ink quite effective. The piece at the bottom is a woodcut that I have started based on the drawing on the right of it. I like the palm tree, I think this will end up being quite a detailed woodcut but I am tempted to make another perhaps just very simple because I really like the looseness of the lines of the palm tree on the left which is something I didn't think about atall when I made them, infact I was thinking of working into them a lot more. Also I think the looseness of my original drawings is perhaps something I should think about a bit. I think sometimes you think you know how to do something like a woodcut but while all the cross hatching and detailing is good it isn't always necesary. Last term in my paintings I tried to work on reducing the details so that I only included what was esential and thought carefully about the amount of detail that was required for a set piece. I have always thought that prints require a lot of detail but I realised that this isn't always necessary either. So I will finish this one but I will perhaps do another of the same image where I reduce the detail and I will try to see what works best. I guess I don't want it to lose the expressiveness of the original study, although the study isn't perfect there is something pleasing about it.

Impressions of Montpellier

Drawing from memory based on the streets of Montpellier.

To round off mes vacances (my holidays), I visited Montpellier on Friday and stayed until Saturday evening. It is a beautiful town with huge elegant facades, grand old buildings, cream and crumbling slightly so that it has a slight air of faded glamour. Palm trees line the streets. (I cannot get over the abundance of palm trees in the south of France, it feels so exotic and makes me think of Hockney's los-angelesian palms). The buildings give the appearance of being much bigger and taller than ours in Toulouse, and the streets seem wider, making Toulouse seem almost quite small and quaint by comparison. The difference in colours struck me too, between the pinks and oranges of Toulousian buildings to the creams and whites in Montpellier. It had the air of an old seaside town almost but with steep winding cobbled streets.

Unfortunately the weather was grey and rainy while I was there but I felt that it was a testament to Montpellier that its charm still shone through. Because of the weather I sampled several cafes and drank wine on a small quiet square outside in the evening. There were many little squares like this, in amongst the cafes and the beautiful churches-which weren't too over the top, in comparison to a lot of french churchery. I spent Saturday in a cafe in the morning where I had un chocolat viennois and ate a pain au chocolat and in the musee fabree, the big art museum in Montpellier. My favourite section was the most modern, dedicated to works from the Impressionist era onwards. I was really surprised and happy to find myself face to face with "Bonjour Monsieur Courbet"/the meeting by Gustave Courbet and I also saw some other fantastic works by Monet, Jacques-Emile Blanche and again to my happiness Berthe Morisot-the only female French impressionist-there is a lot of subtlety and a real delicate handling of light in her work. Perhaps my favourite work was by an artist who I didn't know called Cottell called "Voiliers pres de la cote", I think, it was a grey landsdcape looking out to sea, quite modernist in the handling of the paint. Recently I am finding myself drawn to slightly rugged landscapes and images of wild seas, it seems quite an English idea and nostalgic almost but also like the shipping forecast it is comforting to think about a rough sea from afar whilst safe and in the warmth.

My time in Montpellier passed very quickly, I hope I can return when the Sun is shining and perhaps even make a trip down to the seaside.

I saw several examples of really incredible realistic trompe d'oeil paintings on the side of buildings.

This was actually a flat wall!

Rainy day rooftops.

Recent small paintings and sketches

Water colour study of the view from the bottom of the driveway de la maison ou j'habite.

View from the river banks at sunset, Carcassonne. (started on sight, finished from memory)

The sky over Carcassonne

Studies and life drawings made at the Toulouse Lautrec Museum In Albi