Half Term Review

Plenty to Work On

We were lucky to have a mid course review session with an excellent group of commentators, including Alistair Adams, Susan Engledow, Tony Mott and John Walton. They spent half an hour commenting on each of our work, its strengths and weaknesses. In general, I came away happy with the direction that I am going (I was particularly pleased with the reaction to the picture here top right), but that there are several things that I need to work on. The main points that I came away with to work on were:

More variation in marks. I have a tendency to use relatively similar types of mark making across the picture, at least not planned differences. AA suggested looking at John Virtue (also Paul Wright). He also suggested practising tonal drawing to work at different marks.

Colour consistency and planning, while I do this naturally on similar paintings, I can lose it on larger and more complex paintings. An early colour planning process would help.

Giving equal weight to the non object part (background) of the paintings, in composition, paint application and thought of colour use.

Colour integration, in particular the impact of reflections so that the image settles into one. JW in particular sees my pictures as having a stain glass effect where objects do not relate enough to each other, although in fairness that is more oriented to my older work.