Take it Further

My services as an expert dog-sitter have been required today so I have been pretty much confined to barracks which has helped me concentrate on the Take it Further Challenge. I had been having thoughts about focussing on an artist that I admire and everytime I have given it any thought the Cornish artist Kurt Jackson has come immediately to mind. I admire Kurt Jackson for his work because he is passionate about his art. He lives and breathes painting and works with great freedom and energy in mixed media predominantly, but also in graphite, charcoal, oil and watercolour. I have seen film of him at work and he works out in the open, in front of his subject, often on large sheet canvases which are framed later. He will use any tool in his work to move the paint around and give him the mark he wants, often paddling through the paint or moving it about with his fingers and feet. Many of his paintings include pencil notes made at the time about sounds heard around him or the weather at the time. Many of his paintings incorporate found objects, even old paintbrushes, beach debris, netting, newsprint, envelopes, letterheadings.

I have taken two of my photos of St Ives Bay and combined them to give me a workable composition that I hope to work on the embellisher. In an initial bid to learn more about the composition I have made a sketch of the seascape in watercolour and then in Neocolour water-soluble wax crayons.

I can already see that I am making the usual mistake of not paying attention to the balance of areas in the painting. The brain likes to repeat itself and will often make one area the same size as another which does not always make for a good composition. At the moment it looks as though the depth of my foreground is the same as the depth of the band for the sea. Also, the depth of the sky is equal to the depth of the distant land and the sea. I will need to adjust the sizes of these shapes for a better composition.

I think I have probably left out a step in my process in as much as a pencil drawing may have helped me forestall these errors. You can see from the first photograph that my source picture was fairly square but my watercolour has elongated the scene. This is because I have let my brain take over automatically and not measured the distances and spaces in the photo. My brain "knows" it is a long way to the opposite shore so it has enlarged the mid ground space when in fact that space is quite narrow compared to the vertical of the sky. It will make a better composition if I keep the band of the sea narrower, I think.

I intend to make a small jounal page/wall-hanging on the embellisher and have thoughts of including some stitch and beading in the foreground. My next task is to maybe make a paper collage of the scene and then decide on my base fabric and the fibres I am going to use. I am new to the embellisher so I need to experiment with the effects I want to achieve, particularly for the foreground.