Self Directed Statement

My self-directed project is a continuation from my first term project in which I am studying the urban environment, particularly the varying structures that form the landscape. In my initial paintings I wanted to emphasise certain structural elements of the subject, but also to retain a sense of ambiguity to these paintings. I did this by rapidly painting the outline with a large brush and then highlighting certain sections with thick black Franz Kline-esque lines. I started paying closer attention to my use of colour and begun painting some sections with blocks of colour, with tones more carefully considered than in previous pieces. I was recommended by my Self- Directed tutors to look at Paul Klee and Ivor Hitchens’ studies of landscapes and their use of colour in these. I started becoming more interested in how the colour tones and black lines create a sense of space and where they sit in the painting in relation to one another. In order to move the project forward I decided to see what happened when I isolated the thick black lines from the paintings and re adjusted them around.This process was a way of further abstracting any outcomes which came from this process. Paul Klee became my main source of inspiration once I read 'Klee - On Modern Art'. Klee writes about the creative process of creating a painting, which he believes begins in the subconscious. Klee then goes on to talk about the different dimensions which artists consider while painting - line, tone, value, colour. I began thinking about these dimensions in much greater depth than I had in my previous paintings. I had discovered that each choice of colour changes all subsequent blocks, I saw this as meaning the outcome is continually being rewritten. For each block, I had considered the size of the block, judged in relation to the size of other blocks' sizes. I had also considered the form of each block - the line has influence on this. Additionally, I began considering my choice in colour too, which has been judged in relation to neighboring blocks. I spent time on Photoshop, experimenting to see what happened when I inverted the thick black lines on my A4 paintings to white, in most cases it completely transformed the painting by allowing more focus to be had on the colour rather than line.  Having worked extensively on trying to create a composition with worked harmoniously in terms of line and colour, I decided to see how the compositions looked on a larger scale (100x100cm canvas paintings). I knew by this point that I had become rather bogged down in colour theory and needed to bring back some of the playfulness which was a part of my initial paintings. To do this I sought to loosen the way I applied paint, I took inspiration from Hitchens in this aspect more so than Klee, but at the same time retaining all that i'd learnt from Klee's colour theory.