I like that the stills could be any expanse of water and that the audio of the slo mo videos gives a hint of London. The sounds feel abstracted as they trail off but tease the presence of a bus, a pedestrian, a cyclist. Sounds of london.

I had an idea for lines of different colour , two pieces side by side one starting from the bottom one from the top. Each day I’d add another line of oil in another colour, or with different gradients of the same colour. I decided to use the same three colours each day, mixed with medium so allowed to drip. A combination of control and wabi wabi, serendipity, a passage of time. The drips navigate time in an organic way, the lines more meticulous.

It’s an idea I haven’t got to work yet but one that I’d like to push further. Try with both ruler and hand drawn. Maybe try on natural surfaces to see how this affects the work? With ruler and free drawing. Seeing what happens when you force a direction? It’s never going to be an exact path. Maybe try layering another set of colours over the previous, the drips revealing something from before.

I was in the garden, looking to explore marks of time with paint outside. I tried to paint with three different colours that I thought were autumnal. Autumn by nature has is own marks of time that come with a change of season. I like to be in the elements and prefer it to being in the studio for some reason.

I wanted to explore painting outside and how the paint would react in different conditions in nature. I mixed it with turps to allow the medium to flow and so that it would dry more quickly than zest it. I returned to the same canvases more than once on three different days, leaving them outside to see how the elements would affect them. (This didn’t seem to impact the canvases much).

I enjoyed seeing the different veins of colour, it occurred to me that I was creating a river of my own of sorts. When I saw the paint was about to drip of the canvas, I’d move it. Painting in the round. Not painting from one direction/dimension as I might be with an easel or a wall. It was a very different interaction to painting in a studio. I was constantly moving around, seeing how a different height and speed might affect it, a different slope or situation. The elements were affecting the flow of material, the wind, the lay of the land, the grass, the pavement. A dance between the material, the elements, and me.

I wanted the wind to affect the way the paint fell so that I was I was painting with the wind but at times the wind was too strong and blue the canvas away, distorting how the paint fell. Definitely the slope of the land added more drama. The paint seemed to want to go where paint has been before. One pathway will be created and the next colour seems to want to join the other. A contributory river, joining the main flow. I wonder how I’ll incorporate this method and effect into a visual I’ll like.

I enjoyed the earlier constructions when splattering the paint but as a visual it didn’t feel like enough. I love the marble effect of the initial contact of two different pigments running in a stream but I prefer it when the paint doesn’t fully merge together. When the colours stay there own separate chroma and don’t turn into a puddle of mud. Road vs. grass didn’t seem to make much different to the overall effect but speed and height clearly created different marks that denoted a different time frame.

When taped to the tree, I like the way the bark rivets inform the direction of the paint. I also like that there’s a sort of tattoo on the tree once I’ve removed the canvas. I later noticed completely natural similar marks in similar colours further up the tree.

I left pieces of canvas with drips of paint with zest it to dry vertically to explore the idea of marks of time.

I then ripped and cut the pieces and glued them back together trialling gold paint and imitation gold leaf inspired by the Japanese kintsugi.

I preferred the raw effect of ripping the canvas though this was more difficult, it felt like more was left to chance. The shatter composition felt more disorderly which I preferred, though there was something interesting about the juxtaposition of the river like marks of time running contrary to the reparatory gold. Although this was more difficult to work with than the paint, I like that the gold leaf took on its own form when placed on the glue. It never sat quite as expected and caught the light in a varied, sculptural way.

As the Japanese art of repairing something that has been broken with traces of gold, kintsugi particularly interests me in an age of consumerism and Instagram. As a time when obsession with perfection and the new are prevalent, I like the idea of repairing something where the scars are visible and that the break potentially leads to a more beautiful object than the original. “The revitalised ceramic becomes a symbol of fragility, strength and beauty. “ (Telegraph)

Kintsugi can serve as a metaphor for those feeling broken in life as it facilitates a kind of renaissance mindset. It encourages one not to fear risk taking or being damaged. (Telegraph)

“While kintsugi has endured and fascinated for centuries, its longevity may be due to its tender embrace of accidents and mistakes.” (Artsy)

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/mind/kintsugi-should-embrace-imperfections-japanese-way/amp/

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-centuries-old-japanese-tradition-mending-broken-ceramics-gold/amp

I feel her interest in serendipity, particularly in relation to nature, holds parallels with my interest in wabi-sabi. With “an alertness to chance and coincidence”, she is an observer of serendipity who feels connection with the natural world.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A9meDXPhKIo

“As a landscape artist she is a natural heir to Constable and Turner, a beholder of big skies and seas, with an uncanny ability to make you watch time passing, to see into the heart of things.” I love the idea of using nature to force people to engage with the beauty of now, with the sublime. A wonder of nature that at times has an undercurrent of dread. Her chalk board drawings particularly appeal to me. Beautifully ethereal, threatening impermanence and indicative of education. The Montafon Letter is a beautiful depiction of an avalanche in which many people were killed. It reminds me of Roger Scruton’s insistence of the importance of beauty in art. When beautifully executed, it has the power to provide catharsis for the difficult subject matters in life. I would love to encapsulate a form of beauty in my work, though not necessarily the typical Greek paradigm of beauty that Scruton has championed.

I like her use of gouache and photography. In Majesty she blocks out areas with misty gouache, manipulating the viewers attention in an otherwise typical woodland scene. The change in focus almost anthropomorphises a single tree within a woodland, focusing on a typical English countryside visual, seasons and therefore time.

“All the things I am attracted to are just about to disappear” – I relate to her desire to hold onto a craft when it is moribund, for her film, for me painting.

““Any artist who works in paint or chalk or film or whatever knows that sometimes the medium itself will give you something entirely unexpected, and something far better than what you intended,” she says now. “And at that point you follow the medium.” That, for her, is art.” – I have been exploring the boundaries and potential of paint and would like to continue to do so. I want to understand it’s movement and potential more in order to exploit the “happy accidents”.

She takes a “winding road” approach, following her nose and serendipity. I relate to the idea of following your gut when working on a piece and like the idea of trusting a material. With this in mind a piece becomes a collaboration of artist and medium.

(Quotes taken from the following article) https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/mar/11/tacita-dean-interview-celluloid-heroine-london-exhibitions-film

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/may/14/tacita-dean-landscape-review-a-total-eclipse-of-the-senses

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.cnn.com/style/amp/tacita-dean-royal-academy/index.html

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/magazine-tacita-dean

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b3fkt3 (podcast)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vwbIRLSx7ic

I noticed in the evenings at home, there were interesting shadows and light shapes cast by reflections from mirrors. It’s a time of day when the sun seems to move faster. These marks are so transient, by the time I’d gone to get my phone to capture the moment they seemed to have changed. It’s reminded me again of Wabi Sabi (see prev).

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The marks are ethereal, liminal and intriguing. Perhaps part of the joy in seeing these marks is that you feel privileged to have caught such a fleeting moment.

I like the idea that the reflections are cast by mirrors. Mirrors in themselves are sort of otherworldly. A mirror depicts a version of reality through its own lens. It consistently depicts an image within it’s glass boundaries but rarely projects outside of itself. When it does, it feels momentary, intangible.

Ironically, a photograph renders the ‘impermanence’ moribund. The captured image never quite holds the same beauty as the moment itself. It takes on a new dimension, perhaps beautiful in itself but never replicates the beauty of impermanence.

As a response to the signs of time I saw on mine and Eva’s tube journey and having been inspired by Frank Bowling and Lee Krasner’s use of paint I attempted to try and create my own signs of time using oil paint and pigment.

I tried painting colours I had seen on our journey with a paint brush, running oil and zest it over it, rubbing and dropping loose pigment and gesso and splashing paint to see how this affected the surface.

I observed how each mark represented time in a different way – fast, slow, abrupt, considered, random. I liked the accents of orange and the texture of the loose pigment. Ultimately I was pleased with the overall effect and would be interested to explore how else paint can represent a passage of time.

I tried dripping paint and zest-it onto canvas strapped to an old tree to see how this affected the marks. The bark sent the paint into channels, but the effect was more subtle than I was expecting. I liked the initial effect but left it to dry and the pigment dissipated more than I would have liked. I would like to try repeating this process with turps so that the medium dries more quickly and therefore prevents such a diluted look. I’d also like to try repeating the process over different periods of time over the same piece of canvas to see how this affects the overall look and contributes to the narrative of signs of time.

Having been inspired by the London Museum to look into the different mythologies of the river, Eva and I chose the district line for our tube research as it was the line that seemed to follow the river most closely. We decided to get off at stops that were in contact with the Thames.

Our methodology meant that we parted ways for periods of time to explore and then regrouped to discuss and move to the next station.

Starting at Putney Bridge I went down to the river and took various images. I liked the juxtaposition of nature within the city. I thought they looked like they could have been taken somewhere on the coast. Videos told a different story as the images were accompanied by sounds. The noise of traffic and people contributed to the understanding of the context. I videoed the water in slo mo on my iPhone from different perspectives to see what impact this had.

I looked at shadows, I liked the liminality of them and what they said about a passage of time. I particularly liked observing shadows on steps. From upstairs and downs stairs. I liked the way this changed the perspective of time.

Throughout our journey I found myself preoccupied with marks of time. Whether I had been conditioned to look for beauty in the abstract having been to the Krasner exhibition the previous day, I found myself attracted to various signs of decay in and around the tube station. It reminded me of the Japanese notion of Wabi Sabi, finding beautiful in the every day and potentially mundane. That new isn’t always best and that sometimes (particularly in this Instagram era of consumerism and airbrushing) that the old and repaired sometimes has a charm. When I discussed this in my tutorial I realised I was probably romanticising these marks, but I like the idea of reframing or shifting how we now perceive beauty in western culture.

As we got to the more central stations on the district line, signs of weathering diminished and stations such as Westminster felt cold and clinical to me. Eva and I differed in our perception of the old vs. new, I was drawn to the charisma of the old, what the marks might mean and how we relate to them and she preferred the areas that had been more newly constructed. She asked me if leaving these marks that I liked would prevent progress. What do I think about the relationship between the marks and the city?

I’d never been to Gunnersbury before and was charmed by the area by the river. I felt like I was out of London. I had started the day thinking I’d draw with mud from the Thames but actually worried about how clean it would be when I was there. I did feel slightly at a loss as to what to do so I sketched a tree trunk on the water, observing how the trunks intertwined like river estuaries and enjoying the tranquility. I also sketched a tree at Blackfriars and Westminster. It was amazing to see how much it affected the way I drew. Each environment was so different. Westminster was so busy I ended up including the movement that obscured my view. Each location had such different trees. In Gunnersbury it was right on the river and had space to grow and weave in any direction. At Westminster the tree was tall with a thick trunk , denoting it’s age. It grew in a particular pattern and had obviously been maintained by human hands. At Blackfriars the trees were further manipulated. They looked relatively new and were set back a little from the river. They seemed awkwardly artificial but were welcome in an area with so much traffic.