During these extraordinary and devastating times, it’s difficult to stay motivated when the first thing you do in the morning is check the death rate of your country. However, life goes on and this pandemic will end at some point, so you should make the most of your abundant free-time and be productive.
Although it has been inconvenient for me to move all of painting work from my studio space back home, I do, unlike many others, have all the equipment and space I need to be able to continue with my studies. For that, I’m thankful.
After returning from my trip to New York I initially couldn’t decide what I wanted to paint as I just had so many different ideas and paths I could go down. From New York alone, I experienced the towering blocks of Manhattan, the expansive, natural areas of upstate New York, and hundreds of influential artworks I saw in the MoMA, Met and Guggenheim.
Alongside all the landscapes and buildings I had been studying before this trip, I felt so overwhelmed by ideas.
It is now a week later and since this, I have had a video call with my painting tutor. She was very helpful in explaining that the best way to make progress now would be to create a small series of paintings for each of my ideas. After all, I won’t need to exhibit my work for a long time so it doesn’t matter if some of them don’t work out. I showed my tutor the work that I had produced in the past week and we both picked out the same painting as the most successful (below). So for now, I’m going to analyse why this painting works well, and create a series based on it.
I believe the success of this painting comes from the contrasts in tone, transparency and roughness of brushstrokes. I am very fond of this little abstract but that doesn’t mean to say it can’t still be improved. The colour palette is very limited which causes a lack of contrast in temperature which in turn causes a lack of distance.
I’m going to leave this painting as it is and try to recreate it several times, altering aspects each time in the hope that I will at least learn something from this process.
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