Level  5  Module:     Developing Practice    September 2015

List of Exhibitions I have been to see during the course of this module

Arnolfini, Bristol:  Richard Long.  Time and Space
Tate Modern, London: Agnes Martin Exhibition
Chatsworth House: Beyond Limits
The Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Fiona Banner Exhibition
Eastside Projects, Birmingham
The Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre: Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986
Leamington Art Gallery and Museum: Medicate
The National Stone Centre, Derbyshire: The Milennium Wall
Tate Britain, London: Barbara Hepworth Exhibition
Royal Academy, London: Ai Wei Wei Exhibition
The Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh: Jonathan Gibbs. Life is but a Dream
The Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Resistance and Persistence
The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
The Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. BP Portrait Prize
The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Exhibitions


While in Ireland during last summer I stayed in our holiday cottage which is situated on the south side of Galway Bay and very close to The Burren , a magical place which consists of 250 square kiometres of mostly bare exposed limestone rock.This whole area has a multitude of  dry stone walls which divide the fields and form enclosures.  These dry stone walls  were built by the local inhabitants hundreds of years ago.  Over the summer I spent a lot of time exploring the  Burren and  took numerous photographs of the walls, many of which have a  "lace-like" pattern, with gaps between the stones. The logic of the walls is simple: a wall with holes is less vulnerable in strong winds than a solid one and therefore in theory more stable. Finding that the spaces between the stones made some very intriguing shapes I took hundreds of close up photographs of the view through these spaces. The randomly built stones in the wall create a multitude of different shaped frames for the landscape and put it in a different perspective.

I have selected  a number of these images and glued them to a canvas which I painted black to make a collage:

I am intrigued by the notion of abstraction in painting and I have started to make a series of paintings which are semi-abstract. The inspiration for this work is "wall flora" or lichen as it is more commonly known. While in Ireland I was seeking out stones that I might be suitable for carving and I became fascinated  by the variation of colour and pattern made by the lichen on some of these stones. Some of the colours are so vivid that it looks as if they have been painted on!

I have made two paintings so far that have been inspired by these patterns:

I have also commenced doing a series of paintings using some of the images  from the collage of "spaces

between the stones:" 

As a further experiment in looking at the landscape from a different perspective I have again used one of the   images from my collage of "spaces between the stones". I drew this image in pencil on a piece of board measuring 26ins x 14ins and using a jigsaw I cut around the pencil line. I then cut another piece of board to exactly the same size and fixed both pieces together. I  used acrylic paints on the board to paint this image:

Using another image from my "spaces between the stones" I cut out an aperture in another piece of board the same size as the above. I painted the cut out piece in acrylic paints as below:

I then painted the land ,sea and sky image on the second piece of board as below:

And placed it behind the cutout to make this image:

Having discovered that using two pieces of board as above created a sense of depth in the image I went to try out this method using a piece of limestone. The stone I chose is a piece measuring approximately 26, ins x 14 ins and varies in thickness between 4 ins and 3 ins.  Using the cut out board as a template I marked the image on the stone in pencil as below and started to chisel into the surface:

I carried on cutting deeper and deeper into the stone, stopping very often to resharpen the chisels. I finally cut through, then turned the stone over and finished the cutting from the reverse side.

The two photos below show the finished piece of stone set on a plinth in my studio at college

After  attending printing workshops with our college technician James, I experimented with doing some dry point etching and screen printing. 

I found the process of screen printing particularly interesting and I made prints on both paper and canvas.

The image I made is based on a photograph of the artist Sean Scully. To create a different effect I printed one copy slightly offset on top of another as seen below:

I used a photo of a landscape with a dry stone wall, etched it on to an A4 size piece of acetate and printed this image:

I found both the etching and screen printing very intriguing and I will definitely want to do some more in the future.

My next paintings are two small landscapes on canvas measuring 18 ins x 12 ins. They are inspired by a photographic  image I saw on the cover of a book called The Green Road, written by Anne Enfield. I have used acrylic paints on both of these pictures

One is semi-abstract, consisting of  three horizontal bands of colour, and the other is a more traditional landscape:

My next painting is another small canvas measuring 16 ins x 12 ins. This painting was inspired by photographs I took during the past summer of the area in the West of Ireland called The Burren. The Burren means "Stony Place" and I was particularly fascinated by some of the areas which are very desolate, are covered in limestone paving and divided by dry stone walls that seem to zig-zag upwards  in random fashion or as the artist Sean Scully described it they "lurch in song with the lay of the land". 

Doing this small landscape painting spurred me on to doing something on the same theme but on a much grander scale. Using a painting that had been discarded by a previous student I stripped off the canvas and removed all the staples from the wood frame. Our brilliant technicians at college, James and Tanya, cut a new piece of canvas, and as a lesson for me on how to stretch a canvas, they very expertly fixed the new canvas on to the old frame. They then assisted with fixing the new blank canvas to the wall in my studio space ready for me to paint. I primed the canvas using white emulsion paint mixed with a bit of crimson acrylic to make it a pale pink colour. 

This new painting measures 83 ins x 72 ins and was much bigger than anything I had worked on previously. I found this a bit challenging to start with, as using acrylics the paint dries very quickly which makes mistakes more difficult to correct and also the quantity of paint that needs to be mixed is so much greater. Having got past these initial problems I found that the size of the canvas enabled me to work more freely and made the whole experience very enjoyable.

Although quite clearly a landscape the painting is semi-abstract and refers to what Sean Scully described as  

"the eternal horizon." Personally I prefer to call it "the unobtainable horizon" because we are never quite sure where these elements of land and sky or sea and sky actually meet. The Oxford dictionary gives two different meanings for horizon: 1. The furthest that you can see, and 2. The limit of your desires, knowledge, or interests. Perhaps they both mean the same thing.

Below is a photo of the painting in my studio at college: