At the moment I am considering doing mixed media oil painting featuring various textural elements, having spoken about this with James we discussed how cold wax could be a good medium for me to try for added texture and ability to add objects to a painting and use it for incorporating different mediums to a painting allowing it to not only be a flat piece.
I have done two Lino prints responding to my chosen theme of the spiritualist movement as a way to artistically warm up to making work on the project. I’ve experimented with different ways to produce prints from home without a press and have had success using a marble rolling pin to add some weight so the ink is more evenly distributed.
I feel these are successful experiments but lacking the conceptual elements I wish to convey. I plan to include more elements that represent other parts of what interests me about the subject. Such as the psychology, collective consciousness, death rituals and how humans look to superstition and ritual in times of need or when seeking understanding.
I’m quite happy with these practices, although I struggled capturing faces in such a small scale. Working with pallet knives isn’t something I’ve done before and I enjoyed the mark making of them. I enjoyed the texture and depth that working with oil paint gives. Using both cold wax and impasto medium allowed me to create even more texture. On the abstract painting I also added sand to cold wax to add a more varied and rough texture. As I enjoyed the effect sand added to the mixture in future pieces. In my research of artists I admired the way materials used have significance, such as in Dario Robleto and Teresa Margoles’s practice. So instead of sand, I would like to substitute this for dirt from the ground, as a representation of the places it was taken from. I’m thinking I would take this from my home to represent safety and human connection as this is I believe a core principle of the spiritualist movement and what drove it. I think I would also collect dirt from Arnos Vale Cemetery to represent history, time gone by and obviously death and death customs. I feel Arnos vale would be an appropriate source due to the fact that it is a Victorian cemetery. I may also collect earth from a church or other place of worship as a representation of belief, Spirituality and what this contributes to the movement and us as a society and possibly also dirt from a modern place of burial to show what impact this still has on us today and how the beliefs and practices of the past and other cultures echos to our beliefs and rituals today, reflecting my research on Jung’a theory of collective consciousness.
I’m interested in these practices as I feel using digital processes to look at a historical movement represents my conceptual inspiration of looking at how the historical attitudes to spirituality and death reflect on ours today. By ours I mean people living in the UK which is a mostly secular country and people who are either atheists or don’t have a strong religious leaning. This reflects my upbringing. My mother was raised catholic and I had very devout catholic grandparents and she is no longer catholic but is very spiritual but doesn’t follow an organised religion. My father was raised by non religious parents and is an atheist. I myself am somewhere between an atheist and agnostic and don’t have any religious beliefs or leanings myself but have a curiosity towards religious practices, past and present and this leads me to wonder where these beliefs come from and interested in the variety of ways in which they manifest, including folklore, spirituality, organised religion, the occult and superstition.
I’ve decided to experiment with cyanotypes due to the importance that the birth of photography had to the spiritualist movement and all aspects of Victorian culture, including death, as demonstrated in the popularity of post-mortem photographs to commemorate their loved ones. In these I used spirit photographs printed on acetate, my own printmaking experiments on acetate, my collection of Victorian mourning jewellery and locks of my sisters hair.
I found this process satisfying and exciting due to how unpredictable the results can be which has meant it allowed me to produce a variety of outcomes. I found that the amount of mixture printed on my fabric effected the colour, how long it’d been left in the sun, the light levels on that day, which he objects and images placed over the fabric. These all are variables which have either made an image work or not. I find the first time I tried I’d started too late in the day for it to be exposed long enough but the small amount it got had slightly coloured them, so I re covered the pages and tried again, this time starting earlier and leaving them in the sun for much longer. This produced a different effect than the pieces with only one layer and exposure.
I have come across some issues with there not being enough sunlight for them to come out properly recently since it’s been darker during the day.
I have decided to add more dimension to my paintings i have decided to add photo transfers to my composition, this is done by sticking printed photographs to my canvas using acrylic then when dry dampening the photograph and rubbing away the excess paper, revealing the images. James gave me a demo to refresh my memory from when we did it last year.
With these photo transfers I will be painting around and over them, leaving parts visible. Incorporating photographs this way feels appropriate due to how significant photographs were. Adding them to the composition rather than just using them as a reference for a painting, I feel represents the concept better.
I’m happy with the progress of these. I plan to add other elements to them such as hair due to how hair was used in mourning jewellery, added texture with cold wax and impasto medium, as well as texture from adding dirt, beads from mourning trims.
I visited Arnos vale cemetery to gather some dirt to use in my paintings and to look at the symbolism in the memorials. Arnos vale has a large selection of statues that present the language of symbolism which is a large part of Victorian mourning.
When adding the dirt I dirt tried mixing it with white spirit and linseed oil but it wasn’t thick enough to bond it together and allow it to adhere to the page. I then tried mixing it with both impasto medium and cold wax both separate and together which I found created different effects, also in some places I added small amounts of paint to tint the mixture. The cold wax is a heavier and more matte texture but it does obscure some of the gritty texture of the dirt, however the impasto medium is more glossy and viscous and allows the mixture to be spread thinner. Mixed it has the qualities of both so depending on where I the composition it was added I used them all.
I found this project allowed me to deeply explore paint as a medium rather than just as a method of portraying and image and I very much enjoyed experimenting with ways I can use it in abstract painting. I felt it was a very immersive medium and I very much enjoyed how versatile it was and how it worked with adding the other elements I was working with – cold wax, impasto medium, hair, dirt, beads, photographs, cyanotypes
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