Paintings!

 Painting of Jon, which I finally finished a week ago. I have been working on it on and off since my first week here!

Above, a new painting that I have started of a rue near where I live. I am fascinated by the light, colours and the whole structure of the streets. It is so banal and yet unfamiliar at the same time. This is one of my biggest paintings I have attempted and I'm not quite sure yet what direction it will take ultimately.

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.

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.