Bricking it.
For this assignment I have been looking at what might be unique to my local environment and decided that it was the humble brick. During the 18th and 19th centuries the local brickworks was very productive and produce beautiful red bricks and many of the village front garden walls were built with a variety of shapes of local bricks. These were put together to make unusual lattice patterns and are a distinctive sight throughout the village.
Having taken this assignment on I had to decide how best to present an insight into this local architectural art form. I wanted to be as experimental as I could while thinking about the subject as a whole so I have revisited a few areas that I had dipped into during the course of this module.
These are some photographs taken with 35mm film that I developed and scanned and was thinking that I might try some monoprinting from acetate that had been quite successful earlier. As can be seen, each brick in these patterns must have had its own individual mould and my first thought was to dissect these and make a small study of their shapes. I have previously cited work by Lisa Milroy and wanted to show these isolated shapes as individual bricks spread out on a white background. To allow me to get a sense of the texture I used tempera on paper. The layers of paint dry quickly and a leave a very pleasing surface. The hint of shadow around the edges pick out the shapes well without over doing it and now it is finished I wish I’d made a larger version.
I gained a lot of pleasure from the mono type process that I’d experimented with in part 3 and thought that it would be suitable for suggesting brick work. I used oils diluted with Liquin and painted freehand onto my A4 glass plate. I’d earlier discovered that reasonably lightweight cartridge paper was the best support for absorbing the paint and made sure that I registered this to the plate nice and square. The first print showed a lot of brush work and looked pleasantly abstracted reminding me a little of the vertical and horizontal geometry often used by Sean Scully.
I re-worked the paint and added more green and darker tones while trying to lessen the brush marks and I do prefer the result.
For the third print I have gone for a lattice wall and based the painting on a watercolour from part 2. This one shows lots of brush work and manipulation that I think works better here than in the first print although some of the colour is starting to look a little muddy.
I took some ghost prints from the plates that have a lovely softness to them and the plates themselves often left a good result after the print had been taken.
More experimenting has achieved some variable results, trying brick dust as a pigment just doesn’t work. I tried mixing with oil and water and using a small piece of broken brick to draw with and all failed completely. I have been unable to find the artist who inspired me to try this next experiment but there is an American artist called Mark Nystrom who uses data from wind readings to achieve similar results. I had hoped that a piece of brick might leave satisfactory marks but failed so I used brick red chalk instead attached to string with some C.D.’s to catch the breeze. This was hung from my camera tripod and then left to dangle just long enough to rest well on some cartridge paper. The resulting drawing is the marks made between 4pm on a Saturday and 10am Sunday morning.
The next experiment was to try frottage to pick out some details directly rubbing the walls. This was very difficult and the results were disappointing although a vague impression was left after using brick red and orange chalks.
I tried to gain access to the old brickworks but it is now in private ownership and I didn’t get a reply to my enquiry. Although local planning will not allow demolition there will soon be a large private residence built on the sight and I’d hoped to a have a closer look before it was too late. I’ve played with some landscapes of the buildings from my limited viewpoint and made these on 300gsm cartridge paper that I had primed with acrylic gesso mixed with brick dust. I used the same mixture to coat an old Jaffacake box and tried to replicate a housebrick with acrylics using tones to replicate the indentation.
The first painting of the brickworks themselves was made with acrylics using a photograph taken from the gate of the site. Using this rough gessoed surface is quite a challenge and I struggled to move the paint about but the dryness of the paint and rubbing back with fingers and rag was productive despite being tough on the finger tips.
The second of these was made with oils made thin and liquid with Zest It, allowing lots of manipulation. I worked the trees with thumb and fingers and used the wood end of the brush to incise texture into the surface and a rag to drag the surface paint thinner. Some of these marks are rather pleasing and I think that recent visits to exhibitions of Ivon Hitchins and Helene Sherjbeck have left a some influence on me.
I made these next images by using clear acetate to print out some black and white photographs that I had taken earlier. I developed the film and scanned the negatives then printed the photographs onto the acetate with an inkjet printer. This results in the ink remaining wet on the acetate and allows for a monoprint to be taken from it. When the ink that has been transferred to the paper and has fully dried, I was able to gently add some watercolour to enhance the prints. I like these and think that a large series of work done in this manner could be successful.
I have taken to making monoprints from the left overs on my glass palettes, one of which is a round glass table top. The resulting half round print left me in mind of the brickworks kiln dome. I dragged the remains of a rectangular palette across the bottom and thought it could make an interesting mixed media piece. Not sure in which direction to take it at this stage, I decided to apply some coloured inks using a broad coarse brush and a wad of tissue paper. It was quite exciting to get these bold marks by dragging the ink down the paper. Then I added a collage of a photograph and some left over strips of grey paper and tried to make some flowing marks with a small brush and black ink resulting in what I think is an abstract yet representational piece of mixed media. I had a lot of fun making it.
Trying to tie all these pieces together to form a cohesive whole is proving difficult, each piece is connected to the theme but the diversity of size and the difference in process between them makes me unsure how to put them together as a whole. The more I rearrange them the more chance I have of damaging them. Some thoughts on the curation would be to combine them on one wall in a brickwork manner or even better would be to display them at the local village hall in the relatively new extension, the building of which was partly funded by members of the community who were each asked to buy a brick.
Painting 1 : Understanding Painting Media 