Back to School Update: Painting 223 - Methods and Methodology

One more painting class under my belt last Fall! As I have ranted before - for those of you who are not familiar with many of the contemporary art schools - painting classes are not about learning or refining technique, but about concepts and how to best relay them using a variety of media. Not surprisingly, as a second year course, we were required to experiment with different techniques and media.

Our first project was about consumption and, after doing several studies, I decided to try something completely different.  We have one of the most beautiful waste transfer sites in our community and I chose a view of a series of bins placed in what looks like a countdown. I decided to use "media" that would be going into the transfer site so ... this is a piece painted with garbage on the backside of an old art school project. Coffee grounds, egg, spinach, beets, burnt match sticks and anything else that was left over from supper went into this one. Enough said!

The second project was to be inspired by a quote about Andy Warhol by Mathew Collins (This is Modern Art). "Warhol was a genius but he was a new type of genius. He was a genius at expressing what it felt like not to be sure what you felt at all ... He wrote books, made movies, produced records and painted paintings. A lot of it wasn't good, but he looked at a wasteland and said this is modern art, and it was."
The final product is different than my original plan. The beige panel was to be a wall with a drawing mannequin looking through a window into a surrealist background. My instructor really encouraged me to push and experiment with minimalism so I focused on contrasting the minimalist wall with other elements. I expect to go back into this one and do more on it - maybe add the drawing mannequin.

In the next project, the instructor assigned each of us an artist to research and gain inspiration from. Sure enough, he assigned me Brice Marden who is a Minimalist and Post-Minimalist painter. I credit minimalism from completely turning my youthful self off art in the 60's and 70's so this felt like the worst kind of deja vu. However, after voicing my opinion, I chose to stick with him and I did find his later line work more interesting and inspiring. I have been experimenting for some time with combining painting with felt making. These pieces were experiments with creating pre-felts and drawing lines on them with various acrylic paint mediums. I cut out the line figures of two of the them and then further felted them. Lessons learned - it is really challenging to keep the paint from disintegrating or breaking off during the felting process so I probably won't do this one again.


"Neighbourhood" was our next project and I decided to experiment with photo transfer on stretched canvas. I used photos that I have taken of the amazing wild life that shares my back yard. I am not overly happy with this piece, but am happy with what I learned and plan to use the technique in the future.

The final project was about mass-communication and consumption. This piece became about process and the amount of branding and advertising we are exposed to. I have a stash of old tractor feed paper that I thought would work well to create a large number of logo rubbings and quick sketches. I went around my car and house to do rubbings on anything with an embossed logo. I expected a lot, but it was alarming (if you want a shock, check out the number of logos there are on your car). Next, I sat down for one hour of television and did a sketch for each ad. What was I thinking? I ended up with a "Black Box" spewing out a frightening amount of sketches of advertising images that I encountered in very short period of time.