Landscapes

Proposal

This project seeks to demonstrate the parallels between colour and mood, exploring the juxtaposition from travelling to trapped. It displays the timeline of events over the past 2.5 years, from travelling freely, to suddenly becoming confined within a single environment. I aimed to explore the way colours convey mood and how this was reflected during covid. The exhibition follows my journey from Australia and New Zealand, to lockdown in Norfolk; then as the world begins to open up again, we see my landscapes from UK destinations and finally I explore abroad locations once again. I seek to allow the viewer to relate to my pieces, understanding the sudden change from freedom to confinement. The landscapes begin to progress into abstraction, a subsection of my project, concentrating solely on colour and composition. In doing so, I hope to evoke emotion within the viewer.

The processes involved include acrylic painting, gouache and digital painting. Acrylic is my preferred medium of choice as the quick drying qualities allowed me to layer my pieces. Acrylic also can be applied in a range of different techniques including impasto, where the paint is layered thickly;  this can be obtained through use of brushes and palette knives. This technique allowed me to mix paint directly onto the canvas and created texture as the paint appears to project out of the canvas. I began with a diluted  burnt sienna base, which allows colour to burst through the layers of the painting.

Gouache creates a more block colour effect, an almost computerised resemblance. I find the colours are more vibrant, creating an impressionist affectation. This medium was most effective during the summer months, creating a playful, bright piece. During this project, I began working with digital planning as well as digital painting. I began planning paintings compositionally and testing different colour schemes to create a virtual piece of art that I could rework and change; this often helped me when working on large scale pieces and allowed me to see what worked and what didn't. When layering my abstract pieces, digital planning helped immensely when creating the composition of the piece, the selection of brushes determined which medium would follow.

A main subject of my pieces is light itself. The dramatic sky protruding through the tree’s branches and leaves allows light itself to become the crucial, fundamental subject of the paintings. It forces the background to become something that cannot be ignored. My more abstracted landscapes focused on sky, forest and water and the space around these. The focus on negative space and the exaggeration of colour allows the painting's subject matter to become almost unrecognisable. I aimed to blur the line between abstraction and realism as my project progressed.

Landscape is a subject I only began to explore in depth during the beginning of this project. I was inspired by the vastly differing scenes of the southern hemisphere and how these compare to the English countryside. During my travels, I gathered thousands of photographs so that upon my return I could almost relive my experiences through painting the images.

The collection has a variation in scale which creates a range of representation and thus a variation in viewer perspective. Small scale acts as a window into the understanding, whereas large scale involves the viewer in practice. As well as scale, an artist must consider colour schemes and a sense of consistency. I often use complementary colours within the semi-abstract and abstract pieces to create a sense of harmony vs dissonance.

In completing this project, I aimed to achieve a strong correlation between colour and mood, combining a range of processes. I aimed to allow the viewer to follow my experiences and to hopefully relate to the journey explored.