Update: My Practice

I wanted to use this blog as a way to reflect on my experiences as a practising artist, and recently my practice has recently been evolving quite rapidly. 

Since returning from Venice, I have been seeking a way to try and combine painting, printing and drawing techniques on one surface. This was enabled by the abundance of drawings, paintings and objects that I made and collected during my fellowship with the British Council. 

I stumbled upon a layering technique with tissue paper that allows me to create marks with soft materials like chalk, pastel etc and retain their impact amongst multiple layers of others. See below - 'Rise'. Watercolour, acrylic, oil pastel, pencil, pen and monoprint on board.

I found that this technique has led me into a more calm state in my artistic practice, by which I mean that I am able to relax into the process because of the malleable, changeable nature of working with layering - if it doesn't work, I can cover it all up.

In February I had a space booked in college that acted as both a studio space and an exhibition space. As people passed through the space, they would see the first half of the room in which I was exhibiting completed works such as 'Rise' and others, and in the second half of the room, I had fishing wire lines strung across to create a DIY drying and exhibition space for the monoprints. These were then repurposed for the larger works I was creating throughout the course of the week.

This experience was exceptionally valuable to my practice, as I was able to explore scale, application techniques, printing methods, combinations of materials and more. I was then able to work back into areas that I felt were not working and expand on my work in this fashion.

I focused the majority of the week on thinking about motifs and how I can

• find them.
• express them within my work.
• contextualise them.

And the most common one was that of the channel markers that I saw almost every day during my residency in Venice. Amongst all other imagery, they were the one thing that always stands out in my mind.

Working in this way, I was able to get to grips with how to put the focus on a key piece of subject matter within my work and draw my strengths out by using this imagery. This and my imagination led me to extract an image from one of my larger works and turn it into a new work autonomous to itself.

This represents a new way of making within my practice. A utilisation of the "viewfinder" technique (take a small section that you like, do what you want with it), an understanding of layering, opacity, translucency, a confidence and a sense of knowing what I want when I am creating an image. I am incredibly excited for where my practice is about to take me.

More updates to follow soon.

-Christina Barton