I did paintings based on the responses that people gave us, with the exception of Said’s response and Maeve’s response because they both sent me something they had made.

In this painting I depicted desert areas and streams and lakes, along with darker areas that could be vegetation. The area is remote.

In this image I stained the paper with tea and added watercolour instead of oil paint. I used rosy tones and deep blue shadows.

In this image I depicted a desert from above, with darker areas using charcoal to show the stormy areas and the contour lines of a map.

In this image I painted flesh tones and then I wrote on the painting with oil pastels. I used oil pastels because they were going on top of oil based paint so this meant that they would show up better. The phrase I wrote was “the writing is the different lines on the palm.”

Above is the first email I sent out along with the image.

Below are some of the responses I received.

Previously, I had plans to use one of my paintings from the futures project as a starting point for the final major project; I would make many more works that resemble it and develop that style of painting as my practice. After a second tutorial I have changed the idea slightly into what I think will be a more interesting and less common way of working. I have looked at artists Sophie Calle and Francis Alys to inspire me for this idea.

Francis Alys would make a painting based from one of his performance art pieces, and then he would send this piece to three artists, asking them to replicate it. He would then collect the three pieces of art and make one final painting that combines ideas from these pieces into one. After this he sent out the new painting to a further three artists and ask them to replicate it, an he would repeat the process in order to make a chain of works that develop in an unpredictable way. I really like this idea and way of working, and I think that I will try and do this with my own work during this project.

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The above photos are some of the outcomes and the original email from Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself. In this project she receive an email from her boyfriend where he broke up with her. She then sent this email to over one hundred women and asked them to interpret and analyse the email.

I may take inspiration from this by sending out my painting via email to many people and asking them to analyse my painting. I can then collect the replies and respond to them how I wish. I might make more paintings from the responses, or I might just print out the responses. If I do not get any replies that might be the fnal outcome of my work.

I am interested in the uncertain and working in a way that means the outcome is unknown even to me. It makes working more exciting and gives the work a storyline that I would otherwise not be able to achieve.

During a tutorial I was told one of my pieces was particularly successful. This was a piece that I thoroughly enjoyed because it combined my love of oil painting with my love of writing.

We had a trip to Berlin and whilst I was there I saw works by Cy Twombly. His pieces slightly resemble this, as he uses both oil paint and writing in his work.

I really enjoy his use of texture with the oil paint and also how he has incorporated the words into the piece. In his collection ‘Orpheus’ Twombly responded to a cycle of 55 sonnets written by Rainer Maria Rilke. He incorporated the written word by including excerpts of the sonnets on the canvas, or simply writing the name Orpheus across the piece.

This piece is by the artist Philip Guston. There is a ground of flesh tones in this piece that gives way to the black and grey paint; this gives the piece a feeling of uneasiness as these are not colours usually found in flesh. I like this piece because I like the idea of incorporating writing into it. How would I do this? Would I scratch away at the black to reveal the flesh tones underneath? Or would I let the words disappear into the dark colour?

I intend to use pieces such as these to inspire the pieces I am going to produce for this project. I am going to expand upon the original painting I did in my last project and then develop this way of working to make a body of work.

Notes from my assessment feedback.

Overall my work is good as I explored a lot of different ways of working; I experimented with many materials and I was good at critically assessing my own work and being aware of, my problems which enabled my work to improve as i worked through the project. This also showed good development from one piece to the other. However, the paintings I produced felt too much like safe, known territory for me; they were not experimental enough and as thew work wasn’t challenging me it didn’t take enough risks. The paintings were also not naive enough to be read as naive and not realistic enough to be seen as life paintings. In the future i need to decide what bracket my painting is going to fall under and then research this bracket accordingly in order to make the piece more successful.

The watercolour piece inspired by Cecily Brown worked well because it was looser and more experimental, I didn’t fill in the whole outline of the body; in some places I suggested the rest of the form. I could take this idea into my oil paintings in the future my painting them with more expression than I have done previously, and suggesting outlines and contours instead of painting them explicitly.

The collage piece was a breakthrough point for me in this project; up until then my work had been too conventional and literal, and this allowed me to start abstracting the bodies as the collage wasn’t about situating them in a particular space. I should apply this to my oil paintings by either painting the background of them realistically or giving them a more abstract. solid background. Another option would be to cut out the figure to achieve the same look as the collage. The collage piece gave me the freedom to be more experimental within this project, and therefore opened up new avenues wherein I could take risks and leave my comfort zone. After the collage I did two abstract oil paintings with writing on them. This was the most successful piece in my project. It was much more exciting than the work I had already produced because it was much more free and was a more unconventional subject. I am going to carry this idea on to my Final major project.

I think my approach to projects has improved from the two three day projects to the Futures project. In other projects I had decided on what might be my final outcome and then worked towards it, which can result in my work coming to a standstill when I get to this outcome. For the most recent project on the Future of the Body I decided that I wanted to depict the female form, but I did not decide on much else in the first week of the project. This allowed my ideas to adapt and change as in researched artists and messages I wanted to convey, and I was able to produce a large range of possible outcomes and ideas that I could pick my favourites from. I did experiments with what I wanted to draw on top of the life drawings I completed, and then I also experimented with different materials I could draw with. At first I thought that I was going to draw a motif inspired by Lisa Wright ono parts of the paintings, but I decided that this didn’t have enough meaning, as the research I had done had illuminated topics that I wanted to represent more definitively within my final pieces. I therefore turned to the idea of writing phrases on my pieces, and I experimented with the lengths and types of phrases I could use by writing on printed versions of the paintings. I liked how when you were far away you cannot tell what the writing says; it looks like abstract shapes on the bodies.

I also experimented with different ways of writing; I did some writing that looked almost like a continuous line. At first, I thought that this worked better than writing normally, but after further reflection I realised that this style looked to wistful and not as punchy as the more cramped writing does, and so I decided against using this. I also thought I was going to use a permanent marker or my dip pen and ink for the writing, but on some experiment sheets I used lots of different mediums together and I decided that this looked a lot more interesting, so I chose this instead.

We had a group reflection; in which someone suggested that I should do a piece that was just writing, without a painted body underneath. I thought that this was a really good idea, and so I used tissue paper on top of my paintings to do this, so I could see the body through the paper. I also only used a permanent marker on these pieces, instead of a mixture of materials because this made it easier to follow the shape of the body with the words.

Since the last assessment I have taken more time on my blog posts, making sure I am reflecting on my work as I go, and trying to keep them analytical rather than descriptive when talking about my own work. I have also tried my best to make my presentation better on my A1 sheets, so that they look more professional.

I think that whilst my futures project is fairly strong, I would like the chance to expand further on it and explore more thoroughly how artists use collage and words together to make work, as I really like how my A1 collage sheet turned out and I think that if I could do this project again I would focus on this rather than painting. However, I do not regret choosing painting as my main medium for my work because I think that the final pieces I produced were striking and work very well together.

This is the second painting that I completed. I originally set out to do four paintings, but I soon realised that this would take up too much time as I wanted to paint on to of all of the paintings so instead I decided to do three. At this point I was not sure what exactly I wanted to put on all the paintings so I did some experiments with acetate sheets on top of photos of them.

This is the third painting I completed. I did this one the fastest; I think that as time went on I was able to get faster at painting.

These are some experiments with what I might want to do on top of each of the paintings. I wrote phrases such as: “most women get cat called for the first time during puberty,” and, “almost all women will experience either sexual discrimination or sexual harassment in their life.” I also included a shorter phrase: “what about men?” This was to experiment with the length of phrases as well as how to write them. I also used different mediums to write the phrases, such as: an ink pen, a dip pen and ink, a paintbrush in ink, a graphite stick, a crayon and a permanent marker. At this stage I thought that the phrases look better when written in a continuous line, with some line between each word, rather than writing the words just as a normal phrase but curling them around the body. My intent was to also choose one medium out of all of the experiments and use this all over the body. In these experiments I thought that to have the words without continuous line in between was too regular.

We had a crit session the other day- where we all discussed our work and gave everyone reflection.

People gave me lots of ideas, for example: looking into sex trafficking, looking into using my work to empower women, writing down all my thoughts onto a painting or perhaps into the shape of a figure.

This is my response to someone else’s work.

This is my response to someone else’s work from earlier in the term, looking at our previous project.