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.

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! 

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.