Painted and Masked Plywood Squares - 30cm x 30cm
After returning from New York I was keen to try and experiment within my studio space and try out a new way of working. The method I wanted to try out and experiment with was the process of masking of areas of board and then painting them. This repetitive process would allow me to build up a hard-edged composition which consists of multiple sections' of colour. When starting this new approach to working I decided I didn't want to initially pre-plan any designs for the 30cm x 30cm square plywood boards but to instead work freely to create compositions which communicated the idea of architecture and the grid-like structure of the New York streets. By doing this I wanted to see what my subconscious mind would produce and if I felt they conveyed my time in New York and the architecture I had been surrounded by whilst there. Therefore, before starting each piece I drew a basic and faint design onto the pre-painted surface, to simply dissect the board into a simple geometric composition. Once this was done I began masking and painting each of the sections, choosing colours as I went. The choice of colours I decided upon were previously chosen on a prior visit to Wilkinson's where I bought some small tester pots in the pastel colours of Orange, Turquoise, Green and also Dark Purple and Grey, alongside my Yellow Acrylic paint. These colours where directly influenced by the leaflets , gallery tickets, travel tickets and other associated pieces that I have kept from my visit to New York. This I felt would link the colours to my experience through personal visual references'.
Also choosing these colours refers back to the constructive critism I received previously in my Second Shaun Project Crit about how I was only using bright primary colours.
As pictured above I started with doing Two boards at the same time because I knew that the process of masking and painting demanded each section to have a drying time, so I thought whilst I was working on one, the other could be drying. This allowed me to be continuously working and as a result get more boards done.
When looking at these pieces/ boards I could see a slight abstract reference to the geographical grid like streets of Manhattan, New York and the architecture which I saw looking down from the top of the Empire State Building and Top of the Rock. My overall use of basic rectangular shapes and line formations was something that I thought looked visually pleasing and compositionally balanced. Therefore moving forward I wanted to try and use this linked observation to increase the visual reference to architecture and street layouts in a visually simplistic layout.
By using the colours I wanted to make each piece look individually balanced in terms of composition whilst also being balanced when shown next to the other boards in a collective series of grouping. From the start I anted to reintroduce my normal practice of using colour, in way that I don't use the same colour next to each other and therefore separate them by placing another contrasting colour in close proximity as a way of creating an overall balanced and segregated design of lines and shapes.
This playful approach to creating these pieces allowed me to experiment with both minimalist and maximalist designs to determine which style I preferred visually in terms of how much negative space would be left. I think both styles seemed to appeal to me and this is why I produced the four pieces/ boards that are pictured above. The top two boards have a larger section of negative space which looks to be more spatial in composition with sections of directional lines and shapes positioned around the 30cm x 30cm surface. However the bottom two boards don't look to have any negative space due to how well the yellow, and orange 'Z' like design integrates/ interacts within the overall composition of the pieces.
Although these four pieces are clearly visually different from my usual bright primary coloured pieces, I still felt that they were still expressing a bright contrasted pallet of colours so I began being more selective of colours and introduced the grey. I also mixed some of the grey with the Turquoise to create a more duller Blue/ Green Colour.
With these two pieces I really wanted to produce an abstract representation of architecture and idea of street layouts, whilst trying to refer to the work by Joseph Albers and Piet Mondrian. (Above Top Image is a reference to Alber's work) (Above Bottom Image is a reference to Mondrian's). My reasoning for using these as a creative influence towards these two pieces is based on the work I saw in New York which I feel had a part influencing my work. The way in which they use directional lines and simplistic geometric forms to dissect and segregate the surface is something I feel relates to my work.
Above is a photograph of the series of boards within my studio space. Here I was looking to see how they worked positioned in a line and in relation to one another.