Reallllly loving the work of Fiona Rae right now. Someone suggested I look at her work and it's freakin awesome, I love how vibrant it is. I know it's quite graphic, almost cartoony, but in the mix there's more obviously painted bits which really make it I think. Quirky and bright..legend.

"Hidden Dragon" Fiona Rae (2008)

more instruments...

So I'm going mega over the easter hols with painting, the studio is lovely and empty letting me nuckle down n get the work done! Only just caught up with me that friday til monday I can't be in there :S I'm quite happy with the pace at the moment though, so just thought I'd post up a couple of photos of the paintings I've done in the past few days, some of them need some tweaking, but it's a start..



Excuse the messy space, I'm actually building a mess moutain. But the paintings are taking shape in the chaos hopefully!

Can't wait to see what they all look like together in the positions of an orchestra! As me and my friends were saying though...if there's nothing planned...you can't go wrong - good times :D

The Protecting Veil

This painting is based on a piece of music by John Tavener called "The Protecting Veil", performed by Yo-Yo Ma. It's a goooorgeous piece of cello music that is incredibly passionate and emotive, which is why I picked it for this. I wasn't particularly treating this like a proper art performance, but I wanted to create one in this way to experiment, see how it would come out, perhaps to look at whether I would want to change anything like background etc etc. I'm quite pleased with it, but I'm tempted to use acrylics as well as oils, because this used a fair bit of oil paint and it's expensive stuff!

This a link to a youtube video that has and extract from the piece playing in it (if you can, try to listen to the version by Yo-Yo Ma, it's waay better) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkgN9OjMXgw




Below are some photographs of particular areas that happened to be quite interested. I really like playing around with the random results of the human psyche, whilst listening to music, through the medium of paint. I'm DEFINITLY going to have to try this as a performance piece, hooopefully distancing myself from it a bit, so that it's a far more genuine approach, rather than something that has been thought about too much, because it's all about emotion and passion, not thought.

Performance painting

Fraid I don't have any photos to put up yet, but just felt I needed a bit of a rant on this subject! I love painting, music and texture, so have been making these paintings trying to emulate feelings that are evoked from the piece of music. I've found this leads to some issues though, mainly that it then doesn't look great (when trying to be representational), also it seems to lack a certain depth and passion which is what I was originally going for. So today I tried doing one of these paintings, sure enough, this was the outcome...quite interesting, you could see the movement in the marks I think, but it was definitly missing SOMETHING. So after a considerable amount of procrastination, alongside a good few buckets of tea I came to the conclusion that maybe it would help to make it more like performance art. A while ago now I took part in a performance art workshop run by Dagmar Glausnitzer, fantastic woman, and found it really interesting and fun, if a little bit scary, really have to pull out the weirdo within for this, but it's worth it I think. But anyway, one of the key points to be picked up from the workshop is that whenever you are taking part in a piece of performance art you have to be "in the now", ie. blocking out the outside world completely, becoming aware only of yourself in a detatched way so that you don't think...you just do. Taking this point, I'd love to incorporate this into my painting, it's worth a shot at least, might help. I did attempt to do it once or twice today whilst painting, but I found I was very self concious, so I might need to go and find a space away from people, distractions and embarrassment. I'm annoyed at how self concious I felt, but then it's been a good few months since I tried this, got some good tips from a friend (fellow performance art lover) on how to start it, get into the right mind set for it. So yes, I'll post up the photos of today's painting asap. Might try to do some small performance paintings tomorrow to practice, experiment with having to deal with blocking out the outside world from the mind whilst still having to come back every so often to apply more paint to the brush/broom/mop or whatever, essentially this should be doable, just it's quite hard so we shall see :)

We jammin'

As a part of an exhibition called "Open Road" at the Toilet Gallery in Kingston, I, along with any other artist/musicians at the university was invited to take part in a jam session, told to simply bring our instruments and some form of documentation (to be shown in the exhibition)...and that's it. Given that I play the cello, not exactly the most common musical instrument used for jam session I was a bit terrified, expecting to have to bring music, but actually it was incredibly relaxed and incredibly awesome! It went on for 3 hours, which seems hefty when you say it, but drinks and food were provided and despite the cold temperatures the atmosphere was really good, had some candles around the place and between the 3 guitars, a synthesiser, bongos, a ukulele, a violin, a cello and some singers we all had a lot of fun creating random bursts of music. The plan now is that we're all going to meet up again, and hopefully do a live performance at some point, I'll keep you posted on when that will be. So a big thanks to Kate Renwick for sorting it all out :) This video below is a taster from the session, sorry it's a bit dark - Enjoy!

More experimentation between music and painting

Here are some more paintings where I've tried to merge music and painting, however in the top three paintings here I was listening to some violin music by Purcell in an attempt to get lost in the painting by getting lost in the music, hopefully resulting in a painting that the viewer can get lost in like they can with music. After seeking some advice about this, I've been advised to go big with it all now, get away from these small boards. So I've got myself two large square boards and one large long thin board, I'm thinking of creating a score of painting so to speak on this one, inspired by the work of artists from the De Stijl movement. There is a really awesome exhibition on in Tate Modern at the moment all about the De Stijl art scene, I was originally a bit sceptical because I don't usually like strongly geometric images, but the ideas behind them are so abstract that the paintings then became fascinating. In particular a room in the exhibition dealt with this cross over between different media really interested me. The result being an exciting mix of sound, film, sculpture, painting and performance.
This orange painting was really rather rushed, having spent most of a day trying to create the piece below, I got irritated with it so put some paint on my finger tips, whacked on the music and "played" the board, the result being every single note being depicted in paint on the board. When I'd finished this though aesthetically it wasn't very interested so I experimented with scraping the paint along a bit, which looked slightly better but it still wasn't working so I then put the piece of music on again and scraped into the paint a flowing line where I barely took the end of the paint brush off the board. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I felt it was a more accurate connection between the music and the paint. Maybe being accurate is the mistake, could concentrate more on the general feelings I get when listening to the music and then try to get those same feelings across in the paint. We shall see!



This is a representation of a piano and piano music, and also my discovery of how useful a ruler can be to apply paint, really good fun! Would definitly like to explore more and more weird ways of applying paint. I think board is better for me to work on considering that I will probably be using more and more random objects to apply paint. This week we're having a lecture on "Body in Art", it might be interesting to explore this on the boards too.