4 August 2016. I think it was a good idea to go through my research tasks in a marathon session. It appears that it is far easier to make the connections, if I stay tuned into the subject. So, Adam Dix (*1967, UK) next. My tutor suggested that I look up what he does after having seen my monochrome simple perspective interior (garage and barbecue), because the colours he chooses “have a similar aesthetic”. When opening his website I knew instantly what she meant. Although Dix’s main interest lies in modes and ways of communication from past to present, in one painting, it is his carefully selected muted colours, mostly monochrome, which appeal strongly to me. Since the meanings of colour are more or less universally shared in the Western world, the monochrome settings convey a mood shared by all the subjects depicted in the painting and the viewer. This is particularly evident in “Watch Over Me”, (Dix, 2015) or “Do You Receive Me” (Dix, 2012). The bluish grey haze provides a ghostly setting, where I feel a sense of loss, although the people sitting at the table seem to be doing their best to communicate a belonging together. While I strongly assume that Dix’s choice of colour was deliberate, I cannot say that mine was, especially since some of my acrylic mixes dry up to produce hues totally different from the mix in the wet state. But I will keep that aspect in mind and return to my subject of how to use colour in the conveyance of certain moods, probably already in the self portrait I have to do as my next exercise.
Dix, A. (2012) Do You Receive Me [ink, fluorescent pigment and oil on canvas] [online]. [n.k.]. Available at: http://www.adamdix.com/do_you_receive_me.html [Accessed 4 August 2016]
28 May 2016. Working towards my plan for Assignment 2 I want to use this exercise to explore the relative aggressiveness of colours. Using the same setup as in the previous exercise I would like to convey an aggressive mood by making both slight adaptations to my setup, e.g. the relative positions of my cocktail glasses and accessories, using strong brushstrokes, and, most important, a set of appropriate colours.
Referring to my own blog post on colour symbolism (Lacher-Bryk, 2016) and preliminary ideas regarding Assignment 2 I will do the following: Combine purple black and grey in a background consisting of a very dimly lit detail of a chessboard to achieve a gloomy atmosphere, on which the aggressiveness or gentleness of the other colours is also highly visible.
When looking for any artists exposing themselves to the subject of aggression in their paintings, regardless of the quality of their works of art, they have in common the use of red and black, the use of strong and wild brush strokes and a predilection for exposed teeth in their subjects. This is not the kind of aggression I am looking for. I would like to be able to raise an aggressive atmosphere with something as harmless as a set of cocktail glasses. So looking for other methods:
It is vitally important to create movement towards the attacked object, see e.g. the painting “Abstract Aggression” (2014) by Pratik Chavan (*?, India) or “Three Roots that Obscure” (2015) by Hildy Maze (*?, USA) or even in an untitled work (2011) by Martin Bromirski (*?, USA). In the latter the aggression becomnes visible only at second glance. The shapes and pointed cutouts appear to move in a particular way that evokes a feeling of uneasiness, althought the main colours, blue and yellow, would suggest otherwise. The use of aggressive colours like red to me feels more effective if used sparingly rather than by covering the whole canvas. Apart from the above I did not find too many works of art giving me a lot of new aspects to think about. Being human, we instinctively know all about aggression (I just had another look at Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973, Spain) “Guernica” (1937)) and we can read its signposts very well. For me, the task is to find my own way of transporting it to canvas. Since my previous steps of working towards a finished piece seemed to work quite well, I am going to repeat and possibly correct and refine them.
First of all I will add to the setup some of the ingredients I am planning to use in the assignment piece, i.e. a Belladonna cherry and ivy leaves and use my sketchbook to play with the relative positions of my cocktail glasses with respect to each other and the imaginary chessboard background. In particular, I would like the whole arrangement to appear to to move in a panic towards the viewer by creating an impression of overbalancing “out of the canvas”.
4 June 2016. What a week and no painting. Today, finally, I managed to finish this exercise with a less than satisfying result. In notice that every time something very demanding happens on the hospital front it takes me ages to return to an already started painting. This time it was worse than I ever experienced before, we even thought about quitting our fight altogether, but then, looking at our son, we just must not give up.
Last week we got some ivy and having played around with my arrangement I noticed that it would have to be either chessboard or ivy to avoid crowding and loss of message. And since it is the ivy that is poisonous it was easy to let go of the chessboard. So this is the sequence, on A2 acrylic paper as in the previous exercise (Fig. 1-6):
Figure 1. Setup through my viewfinderFigure 2. Intuitive first layer of coloursFigure 3. Strengthening the colours, taking back the 3D impressionFigure 4. Finished paintingFigure 5. Finished painting, detail with complementary and similar coloursFigure 6. Finished painting, creating space without using perspective
In summary I very much enjoy this new way of painting, but my brushstrokes are so inconfident and change with every object I paint, and even when I paint over an old layer, that the result is less than convincing. I do feel, however, that I start recognizing the weakest bits and after having dealt with them I find the next weakest bits. This means that I could go round and round in circles and never finish this exercise. Hopefully learning takes place here, too.
Comparing the result of this exercise with the previous one: It was definitely easier to paint with two complementary colours and white only. In this exercise I spent a long time thinking about the juxtaposition of colours in connection with the message I had in my mind. I did not refer to the setup again after having produced a pencil sketch and drawn the outlines on my paper, because I wanted to see whether intuition would be capable of taking over the final choice of colours and the position of additional – and imaginary – accessories in creating an aggressive atmosphere. This was probably the mistake, because I feel that I am not ready yet for such a complex task, but I will go ahead with my plan for Assignment 2 nevertheless. I owe it to my son.
ANDREA 's OCA PAINTING 1 BLOG 
