contemporary art – Mixy's Art Blog

Color and Eye-Fish 2/52

My weeks now begin (as this year did) on a Thursday. I like this! It breaks up the week/weekend pattern in a refreshing fashion and in a way seems to make time stretch. I’m a busy person, this is enormously helpful! Week 2 of this year started out on a drainy-grainy grey day and I really needed to counteract that, so I did in the only way I know how: with colors.

I began with a wash over white gesso with Pebeo Colorex chartreuse ink I LOVE this color! This is my happy color! although it gets covered over through the week, little bits are still shining through.

The page already had a smeary something (acrylic paint? I forget already) on the right page which discolored to a nasty beige with the ink smears. But no matter, it’ll be obscured with stuff before long. To begin with, the same three strange eye-fish as last week. I can’t really explain them yet, I’ll come back to them later.

Swimming through the inks.

Slipping behind the doodled-on beige paint slick. The eye-fish do their thing…

Then it got some washes and splashes in Adirondack Stream. Close and open the book for a bitova Rorschach style ink spreading manoeuvre.

That puddly wet ink was just crying out for something a bit more lively and vibrant, so on with the Derwent Inktense

I love the variety of marks you can get scribbling on splashed paper, the wet and dry work well for doodling into with a fine paintbrush and water.

So that’s where my week began, It’s progressing a bit more each day so check back soon to see the next transitions 🙂

nen nen ju shin ki

Thought forms are the children of an earlier project, my final project in the first year of my art degree. Focussing on the idea of meditation: trying to still the crazed jabbering of monkey mind, find some spaces between the thoughts.

Thought following thought following thought – rattling by. That internal monologue of commentary, judgements, relentless parroting of worries… do you listen to the babble? Do you try to drown it out? Music, TV, incessant banter – some folk don’t keep it inside – they are a non-stop torrent of witterings.

It can be exhausting.

And fascinating.

This piece took shape as a 3 metre x 45 cm relief collage constructed from reclaimed bits and bobs, mostly painted paper, card, pins, tiny scraps of wood, wire, staples. These kinda things. The things and stuff that came to my mind as I was making it. Positioned in a corner it draws the viewer in so they become a part of the work, surrounded by the noise.

Complex trains of thought – interconnected and overlapping – are represented by the darkest and most detailed elements.

The process of meditation calming the mind from the persistent banter of thoughts by suspending this mental chatter from one moment to the next is represented by diminishing detail and lighter tones reducing to nothing in the centre.

I’d love to recreate this on an even bigger scale some day.

Thought forms

This is one where I’m beginning in the middle. I’ll catch you up on the beginning next, but let’s start off here, just coz I feel like it.

Thoughtforms are a series of relief collages I’m making from the dyed paper (way back… remember the dyed paper?)

and the don’t-know-why-but-compelled-to-keep-making-them funny little colored rectangle things.

So these loose ends are also finding each other and forming into slightly more coherent entities.

Thoughtforms are continuing that recurring theme: trains of consciousness & patterns of thought. More on that later.

I’ve made 6 of a series that will total 9, 3 are still in progress. These 6 are on display (and for sale – if you’re quick before they get snapped up!) at the Upstairs Gallery

Each one is named after a fragment of text found somewhere in the piece, serendipity giving them eclectic names such as: Spacecraft, Puddings cakes etc, Fortitude and Adversity amongst others.

The next series will include more textile elements, but the overall feel will be similar.

Still with that one theme leads to another, one thought folds round a corner and opens out into a coiled up spring, some buttons and a rivet, stitched onto the overarching idea of something else.

Or something. Y’know, like it does. The beauty is they can represent whatever you want them to. Or nothing at all if you .

More Than The Sum Of Its Parts – Part 2

Yesterday I was telling you how Zak Smith’s art was the starting point in this little project of mine. At the same show I got to see the work of another favorite artist IRL, Dominc McGill.

Moloch - Dominic McGill — Moloch – Dominic McGill

Again there’s a lot of mono with splashes of color, intensified contrast. I love the mishmash of text in art, increasingly it’s something I use in my own work. It was around this time the Tate Modern was showing Mira Schendel.

Much of Schendel’s work was displayed hanging so you could walk round, through and between the pieces, be involved, enveloped, almost engulfed.
So I’m aborbing this work, there’s an osmosis going on. I’m gathering ideas and doodling them together.