Contextual Review

Part two of the course has been a big turning point for me. I have started to work mainly with oil paints which is something I had never tried before. Until part two I had been working with pencil and rarely ever used paint. Going out of my comfort zone has helped me to see that the way I work and my ideas really lend themselves to the qualities of paint and ultimately tend to work better as paintings. After spending some time getting used to the ways that oil paint behaves, I have found that I can use the slightly more unpredictable nature of paint to my advantage and I actually really enjoy the amount of uncertainty that comes during the painting process compared to working with pencil which I feel is less dynamic. One painting in particular that I have done comes to mind which I feel consolidates all of this. It is painted on a small wooden panel consisting of a horizontal blend of light and dark colour, reduced and minimalistic. When starting the painting it felt somewhat insignificant and then seemingly with just one or two brush strokes the whole painting changed into something I was really happy with. It was one of the first times since using oil paints that the end result was almost exactly the same as how I had pictured it in my head. I really feel that this was a pivotal moment for me - it gave me so much more confidence in my ability which really excited me and made me certain that I wanted to continue using oil paints.

Research has continued to be a crucial part of my work. At the beginning of part two I came across an interview with the artist Agnes Martin Her meditative practice helped me to see that art goes beyond words. I now understand that art does nott have to be describable and because of this I can use it to explore the indescribable. Gaining this new perspective has felt so freeing - I now feel confident to work from the viewpoint that art doesn’t always have to be ‘about’ something. I have realized that it is okay to create work that doesn’t depict anything at all and it doesn’t necessarily have to be understood by the viewer. I really love Agnes Martin’s ‘Morning’ as I feel it perfectly encapsulates this. Reading her essay ‘Beauty is the Mystery of Life’ has also been influential for me (Martin 1998). The main message I took from reading it is that art doesn’t have to ‘save the world’, and personally now I feel much less pressure when creating my own art. For this reason, I would like to take this message with me going forward. I am really happy that I learnt about Agnes Martin so early on in part two, as finding out about the way she works has had such a big influence on me and still does now.

Discovering the artist Shirazeh Houshiary has also been influential for me. I am interested in the

way history, science and poetry influence her work, as this is something I would like to take advantage of more in the future. The way she uses ambiguity and doubt to question reality and challenge our perceptions feels really significant. She describes her piece ‘Veil’, a canvas painted (seemingly) entirely black, as “a protest against knowing”. In a video interview with the Tate, Shirazeh Houshiary talks about how important mystery and ambiguity are in art, which I completely agree with (Houshiray 2014). I started to think about the effects that the absence of information in a painting might have on a viewer, and this then became one of the main ideas behind my work for part two.

With abstraction being relatively new to me, I feel it is important to continue to explore that area further in part three. I would like to continue to work with the main ideas that I have learnt in part two, but also widen my knowledge of other artists and their ways of working (Sontag 2001). For example, I really like the artist Mary Potter and her work, and I would like to research her in more depth. I have been working in a very reduced and minimalistic way and her work is slightly more figurative but still in a way that is not too obvious which I like. I think this could be interesting to experiment with, perhaps using charcoal and chalks, as I think they can have quite a ghostly quality. I am really looking forward to part three and excited to continue making art.

Bibliography

Highmore, B., 2002. Everyday life and cultural theory: An introduction. Routledge.

Houshiary, S, 2014. Art Has Ambiguity Tate Gallery, Tate Shots. Downloaded on 19 February 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwTehaUOkhg

Martin, A., 1998. Beauty is the mystery of life. Uncontrollable Beauty, toward a New Aesthetics, Allworth Press, New York, pp.399-402.

Sartre, J.P., 2021. Nausea. Penguin UK.

Sontag, S., 2001. On photography. Macmillan

Reflections part 2

Confirm copying