Revisting and renewing old works

On one of my previous blog posts I spoke about how I have used materials from old work to make new work. This week I am still playing with the 6 LED Light Sheets sourced from my old work Repeated Everyday.

In the past couple of days I have been layering coloured acetate's on top of the light sheets to make new light drawings (images here). I have been excited about the results and think that the use of transparencies works well within my practice and within my research into luminosity.

Today I decided to use the notion of reusing elements within old works to use within new experiments. I pulled open my plan-chest draw to find 10's of works on paper that I had made last year as part of my Arts Council England Grants for the Arts Research and Development funding which I was awarded.

There were some works that I never showed as they didn't quite work. They didn't work because the colours were too flat or sordid or there wasn't enough white space around the image; basically the image I had created didn't jump off the page, like the successful ones did.

I felt this was a shame, but didn't bin them. I don't keep everything, but I kept these sheets. There was elements within them that I liked, but they weren't 100%. Now I know why...

They totally lacked luminous colour! 

I was attempting to use bright hues, but the colours didn't sing. 

One by one, I laid the works on paper onto my LED light sheets and photographed them. I felt a sense of excitement when a few of them started taking on a new lease of life. The light source offered the colours a voice: they were singing!

The colours were at last, vivid in their hue, saturate and glowing; they has become luminous. Of course not all pieces did this; especially the ones where I had applied colour on top of black or collage. The blackness blocked any saturation the colour could muster altogether.

In some of the more successful ones, shown below, the use of the black separates the colour, as a line in a drawing or a wall within a space. I believe that this is how these works should be shown. I feel they are finished. 

Such a simple change makes all the difference. Lifting them from out of my draws, out of their dullness, and into becoming possibilities. I see all my works on paper as possibilities: potential for how they could be taken into three dimensions and how they might one day occupy space.

Day 6 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

After finishing my book yesterday, I was left with lots of different ideas for how to start testing and playing. I wanted to carry on with the mini-projects I had begun to set myself (I like good project), they were proving both useful and practical. 

I was beginning to find my voice again, after initially going on this residency with the aim to strengthen my ideas and challenge concepts within my practice, I was gradually learning bit by bit more about myself. Re-discovering why it is that I am so immensely fascinated with colour and light combined. 

Luminosity was the word that encapsulated both interests in a way that made sense to me. The notion of luminous colour seeping, spilling, bleeding and staining the surfaces around us has been present in my practice for years, now I had a word for it. 

In the essay 'The Luminous and the Grey' Batchlor writes;

Luminous colours, however old they are, appear to have a particular relationship with the world around them and with their beholders that is unlike that of other colours. First, these are colours that escape their containers and bleed into the street; they deliver what colour always promises bus doesn't always achieve: a release from the surfaces and materials that support it, a release that leads to the fleeting magic of the 'fiery pool reflecting in the asphalt'. p.49

My has always been my challenge and interest to capture this notion within my practice. This concern, I feel, now has to be researched, pulled apart and made into being work, as my understanding of the medium deepens.

Reading whilst on this residency has been initially challenging for me, but has given my so much back in return. When I return home, I shall keep it up, keep learning and keep feeding this knowledge back into the work I develop.

Today I started to think about luminous colour within nature (as it was on my doorstep). Making a series of 'colour slides' which became little jewels when held up to a light source. I was thinking small-scale in order to trial the idea, the photographs below demonstrate how flat surface colour become luminescent.

Remember what I wrote on Day 3? - "What interests me about colour in the natural/rural landscape is the vividness created when the intensity of the sun shines onto/though it. More on that later…" In this experiment I was testing this thought out, instead of using the sunshine (of which there was very little on this cold autumnal day) I used a bulb.

Day 5 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

As my residency continued into day 5 at the famous Merz Barn, I became increasing aware that I had slowed my pace of life down. Reading had pretty much taken over as my daily task, then amusing myself by making relatively quick responses to the chapters in the form of mini-projects.

So far these mini-projects were helping me understand the meaning and concept of each chapter, allowing for a deeper knowledge of colour concerns, perceptions and discussion.

Today I had reached the last chapter. It was all about grey. I am not fond of grey, admittedly. The rest of of book had highlighted the use of luminous colour around us; in the media, in our cities, in our general everyday lives and why is is so brilliant and optimistic. I was not looking forward to the chapter on grey. I thought to myself - "no one is ever going to manage to convince me that grey is a worthy colour, is it even a colour? - more like a tone..."

I read on regardless, trusting the voice of the author wholeheartedly. His writing so far had been accurate, believable and educating.

David Batchelor's first line of the chapter is; "Grey is the colour of dying" - great! The last sentence of the chapter finishes describing the closing sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev (1966), it reads:

"The last, silent shot returns to the living world and to a panorama of grey, but a quieter, more humane and perhaps more luminous grey."

LUMINOUS F*****G GREY! The longest and most convincing chapter by far, but all that was written in between these two quotes was the most useful of all. I have been looking at grey as the neutral, bland, pessimistic, nothing colour for years.

I went outside of the gallery and pondered, looked around me; I noticed blues, reds, greens, oranges and all different colours within the greys around me. I realise that this is not a breakthrough for mankind, but I had been so dismissive about grey that I had not looked past the end of my own nose (and I have a sizable nose!) and so this was a small revelation for me personally.

"It is close to impossible in practice to find a grey that is not inflected by some other colour, although the not-grey of grey often only becomes visible as two or more different greys are placed next to each other. It is as if when a patch of grey is first seen it is more assumed than observed." p.78

Having completed this chapter and finished the book, I went off in the beautiful landscape and woodland of the Cylinders Estate where the Merz Barn is located with my camera and came back with the following set of images - as confirmation that blue -grey, red-grey, green-grey, really do exist and are BEAUTIFUL! 

The last image is more of a luminous grey than all the others - the sky!

Now I had finished my book and nearly finished my residency - what was I going to do?

 

Day 4 - Kurt Schwitters Merz Barn Residency

Today's mini-project revolved around the notion of how we remember surface colours and how our eyes respond to light.

Batchelor writes about the way in which we see colours as the property of the object. Even in different lighting conditions; our colour memory tells us what colour we think am object is. We make assumptions about the colour of an object based on what we have previously experienced, even when we see the same object under different lighting e.g. in a darkened room.

Colour constancy: "The facility that enables us to piece together wildly divergent perceptual experience of colours - a coloured object in sunlight, at dusk, in shade, at a distance, in varieties of artificial light, against other colours and so on" Batchelor suggests.

"Seeing the same objects under... different illuminations, we learn to get a correct idea of the object colours in spite of different illumination. We learn to judge how such an object would look in white light, and since our interest lies entirely in the object colour, we become unconscious of the sensations on which the judgement rests." - Hermann von Helmholtz (physicist and theorist of visual perception)

I wanted to test this theory.

I gathered a few objects from the Cylinders Estate, all of which depicted colouration of the chemical variety; colour only available within industrial manufacture (plastic, paint, etc). The hue in these objects is unchanging, until decay and weathering takes hold. They are entirely monochrome.

I photographed them under different lighting conditions: outdoor natural light; against a natural background, under artificial light; fluorescent and halogen. Below are the resulting images.

Although my experiment was fairly crude, it points out exactly what the text is talking about.

I am trying to think about exactly which colour I remember these objects to be; out of the possible three differences I saw. I 'think' of it to be the most vivid. To someone else, however, this could be different.

Interesting much....