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.
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