Elective 2: Painting

 

 To start off the painting elective, we were told to gather images which excited and appealed to us to discuss on Monday. Here are some I'm considering:

Morgan Doyle

I started to look at the work of Morgan Doyle, a printmaker from cork. I really liked his work. I thought the use of colour (which is subtle and used pretty sparingly) is really effective and I like the block application.
The artist seems to capture the essence of the places he's depicting in an almost abstract way as if he is recreating the places from memory, only recalling the general shapes, colour, tones and atmosphere.

More print

I decided to build up the soft and subtle greys of the abandonded wall with colour. I thought of the colour as almost a symbol for the life and personality of my space- and how it could bring warmth to the place. At the same time I didn't want to lose the soft quality of the monoprints so far...

I then decided to explore the idea of adding more of a structure to the prints by doing a quite geometric line drawing in drypoint. I printed this over a few of the prints, but I think the dark and quite structured quality of the drypoint was a bit too strong for the prints and took away from them a bit.

Elective 1: Print

Our brief for print is "Defining Our Space" through the processes of drypoint and monoprint or a combination of both.
When I first read through the brief it all sounded very familiar as the idea of defining our space, or how it defines us, how we occupy it and how we continually alter, experience and personalize and the general impact on the space around us all described the things I had begun to explore in the first semester, where my project was on the process of moving home.
I decided to use the print elective to further my exploration of the same idea- and began thinking about how moving home, which is essentially the taking apart of one space, with regard to the personalization of a bedroom for example in order to recreate it in a new location.
I revisted the idea of my bedroom wall as a canvas of sorts and decided to experiment with the idea of one place fading away as a person (in this case myself, when I moved to Limerick at the beginning of this college year) moves home.

To begin, I created some very washed out and transparent grey monoprints, which gave an almost abandonedd and ghost-like quality to use as a basis...

Monoprints

(a whole lot of grey...):

Some sketchbook work:

Settling and such...

I have noticed as my project has progressed and as I continued to photograph and work from my two "home" spaces, for example in my painting and printing, how much these spaces have changed over the course of the last 3 and a half months. The process of moving home can be seen in the taking apart of one place and creation of another as I settled into my new space. 

I found this particularly evident after returning home to Galway for the Christmas break.
My room at home had become so stripped of any personality (even more so than the initial time back at the end of the summer when I was packing up to leave for Limerick) and my bedroom in Grove has become a more comfprtable and home-y type place now.

This was such the case that when I went home for christmas my bedroom felt like quite a bleak and lifeless place to be. It was like moving all over again. It was strange as I realised, I don't really know where my home is anymore. I've been so torn between moving between Limerick and Galway that both bedrooms have become quite in-betweeny place, and maybe I've even started to feel more at home in Grove..


I started to think about this in terms of the idea of movement and I got to thinking if my new cosy bedroom in Grove was the product of myself forcing my personality onto the walls in order to speed the process of settling in along? Because I had always felt my old bedroom had been the homely familiar product of many years of personal accumilation, but maybe it's just as easy to create instant personality on the walls?



I decided to play around with this idea on the blank walls of my Galway bedroom, creating an almost temporary looking personalised wall.

But overnight the wall fell apart...

As the days turned to weeks at home in Galway my bedroom seemed to become it's cosy self that I remembered.

My room (and/or my photographs) always seems to have this orangey yellow glow, which I think gives a warm comfortable feeling. I really like the colours and the softness so I decided to do a quick painting:

  I must admit I did find it difficult leaving my cosy and familiar home to return to Limerick (even besides the thinking about the looming semester 1 assessments!) And although  I have settled more in Limerick compared to at the start of this project, I feel even more now that I am almost without a home. I feel a little bit torn between two places...

This is what my bedroom in Limerick looks like at the moment:

 

In the midst of all this comparison of bedrooms and spaces etc. I found a really lovely blog ("Nice Bedrooms and Stuff": http://nicebedrooms.tumblr.com/) which I have been obsessively ploughing my way through for the last week or so. I've found I have a real interest in space/rooms and I really enjoy exploring how different rooms can reflect a persons personality so much...