painting

Futures Project Part 6

One in Four Girls Have Been a Victim of Sexual Discrimination or Sexual Harassment at Least Once in Their Life

I have written statistics highlighting truths about gender inequality on the paintings that prove feminism is an issue of the future, not just of the past.

Two Hundred Million Girls Have Undergone Female Genital Mutilation
Four Hundred Thousand Women in the UK are Sexually Harassed Every Year.

My intention was that from a distance the figures look like they have abstract shapes drawn on them, ut as you move closer the words come into view.

Following the Crit session we had, I decided to take on board the advice I was given and also do pieces that are in the shape of the figures, but just made up of words.

I did these figures on A1 tracing paper which I laid on top of the paintings.

Most Women Are Cat Called For the First Time During Puberty
One in Three Women are Sexually Abused at Some Point in Their Life
Sixty Two Million Girls Are Denied Education All Over the World

I tried to write the words in a way that not only the outline of the shape could be recognised as a women, but also certain features were highlighted as much as possible, such as: the breasts, the hair and the head and neck.

Futures Project Part 5

After my previous experiments I had decided that I wanted to do phrases that were medium to long and had continuous line in between each word. I was pretty sure that I also wanted to use my dip pen in ink as well, but I wanted to try out all the mediums on top of an oil painting so that I could see how this surface might affect the medium, and also how the colour worked with a medium that was more opaque black versus one that was more grey.

I painted two A2 sized sheets with oil; one was random colours that can be found in many of the paintings of figures I have done, the other carried a slight resemblance to the female form, and also had many of the skin tones that I gravitated towards when painting the figures.

The phrase I wrote all over this painting was: “Six hundred and fifty million women alive today were child brides.” I used many different black mediums: acrylic paint, dip pen in ink, black ink pen, black felt tip, permanent marker, graphite stick, pencil, paintbrush in ink etc. When I was completing this piece I thought that I was going to choose the other way of writing the phrase; by putting a continuous line between each word.

However, after completing this piece with the same range of mediums, I realised that the other option looked far superior. This is because the writing is closer together and therefore appears to be more powerful and striking. I am looking to achieve a piece that is powerful rather than wistful, as this example appears with its curly lines. I also decided to change my mind about just using my dip pen in ink. I think that the range of mediums really complements the piece as writing with a pencil allows you to get thinner and smaller words than a paintbrush does, and so therefore there is variation in the weight of the marks and the size of the letters.

Futures Project Part 3

This is the first painting I did for this project. I painted with a looser, more expressive style than I used to during A Levels, and subsequently this took be a fraction of the time that a painting usually would. I think that this makes the piece more interesting than if it was realistic, and it also allowed me to take certain liberties with the anatomy of the figure as my reference was a life drawing that was nowhere near perfect and so the body would never be perfect.

The face in this painting is not as soft and delicate as I at first wanted, and the nose looks unfinished. I also think that I should have gone further with the expression of the piece and made it much less realistic and more stylised.

I started with an underpainting to get the general shape of the figure, then I gradually built up layers of detail until I reached the desired affect.

The main flaw with this painting is that I painted mostly from memory. This means that I am unconsciously projecting my own ideals of what the body should look like-or perhaps what I want my body to look like- onto the painting. This is a result of schema: the scene that my brain built up as a memory. This is generally not an accurate representation of the body as I only remember certain aspects correctly and my brain makes up the rest- it reconstructs it- as perceived by Bartlett in Reconstructive Memory Theory.

Above are some more responses to the painting, and what I might do on top of the actual painting. I think that I am going to write phrases over and over again all over the painting, but make it look like the first slide. I want to make sure that the finished piece of work doesn’t look like a life painting as it does now.

I also did an experiment sheet using acetate sheets over printed copies of the paintings that I then painted on top of.