Assignment 5: A series of painting on a theme

The theme of my final piece is Willows.

I started the series while trying the impasto technique; I painted a few pictures during the whole process and picked one as a starting point to be explored. I worked using random photos either ones I took or found on the internet. Many artists doesn’t like using photographs in their work, from simple reasons such as the details aren’t present and we definitely see more with our naked eye but for me the most important was to show a random landscape using the impasto technique, in the technique the most important thing is how you translate what you see on the photo into the painting. I tried to show, by eliminating certain detail, a certain feeling in the painting. To create a more interesting and challenging series I chose trees which for both me and many artists are a huge task while painting, I wanted to show the dimensional living form in a simple space without worrying too much about the sky. I found that after the first painting some sign of atmosphere and a feel of an autumn weather and decided to continue with this theme.

“The Willows 1” Acrylic and Impasto gel on canvas 80/60cm

  Next I painted the same trees changing the tone of colours, using a traditional way of painting. The biggest challenge while painting this was the branches and bushes as I wanted to show the composition of trees and the rhythm they create and in the colour I wanted to create a oneness with the rest of the painting.

“The Willows 2” Acrylic on canvas 80/60cm

 I then went onto something different and change from acrylic to gouache on board and tried a different mood using a completely different palette of colours. For me this was a way to show the same theme but in a more abstract way.

“The Willows 3” Gouache on board 80/60cm

 The fourth piece in the series going back to acrylic I wanted to show the structure of the tree itself using darker colours including a lot of black detail. I wanted to get a more realistic form of a landscape, to show the same object in a conventional way and also try to do the same theme in a completely different style.

“The Willows 4” Acrylic on canvas 80/60cm

 The last picture in the series is a more abstract and expressive form of the theme. While working on this piece after painting the first sketch layer of paint I added some paint brush hair in some areas, gluing it to the canvas using impasto gel, I didn’t wait till the gel dried but started the next layer of paint straight away so the hair still moved under the brush strokes. This was a very interesting experience as this created a barrier for my paintbrush and a natural relief was created which I then covered in paint. In some sense I felt like I didn’t have complete control over what happened but this created an element of randomness which after drying gave me a form of what to paint next, which was to go over the relief and between it. First idea was to recreate the same painting in this but after seeing the effect I decided to minimalize the sharpness of the trees and worked with a paintbrush to show just the branches and the light between them covering the rest of the trees showing them as less important. I would call this an attempt to create an abstraction with a theme suggestion in the background showing that there is something natural in it.

“The Willows 5” Acrylic and Impasto gel on canvas 80/60cm

 The whole series of paintings has the same theme; I deliberately didn’t copy the same shape of trees because I wanted each painting to be different so I explored each one in a different way.

Work on this project was definitely an evolution of me as a painter and I see similarities such as brush making and creating form and space as I tried to show a personal attachment in each piece. I worked relatively expressively but still managed to leave a personal mark on each work. I am aware that each painting has a different degree but I tried to use different medium and some are more or less skilfully demanding when manipulation it to the painting. I was not able to eliminate some problem during this project I also see problems after some time but unfortunately I do not have time to fix them. During this project I looked at many artists and used the book by Ian Simpson “The Challenge of Landscape Painting” published by Collins but haven’t adopted any of the other artists’ techniques and used my own inspirations to develop.