Reflection of Fine Art Practice 1 Transformation and Translation

Reflection of my practice

Throughout my time at Six form I always presumed I was a painter due to me always creating paintings for my coursework and even my art teachers told me that my practice was painting but this was due to the lack of facilities they had and how we wasn't even allowed to create a mess in our own art room so it was hard to experiment with a vary of materials and medias. After Six form I decided to go and study a foundation course in art and design as I felt like I didn't have enough experience in different medias to go to university. This course allowed me to experiment with photography, print making, performance art and so much more. During my foundation course I focused more on photography and trying out performance art what I felt like I connected with more than just simply painting as I want to create artwork with a meaning and also that has a story behind it what would intrigue the audience. From doing foundation I knew I was ready to start university.

Starting Leeds College of Art

Transformation and Translation

Transformation and Translation was the first project we was given in our Fine art degree. In this project we had to transform and translate our summer project work where we created a piece based on our own practice and emerged it with another artist. I decided to pick Marlene Dumas as I find her artwork very interesting as I prefer to work with portraits and that's her main subject matter.

Summer Work based on Marlene Dumas

Barbie 1995
Watercolour on paper
66 x 50 cm

For my summer project I have two pieces as the top one was my original work but I really disliked it as I used a mixture of photographs and watercolour drawings together what I thought would work but the composition of the piece looked to busy so I decided to make it more simple by just using a part of a photo on tracing paper and lay it over watercolours what worked so much better as the piece didn't look as busy as the other piece.

Created with charcoal, ink, pen and masking tape

I began transforming the piece by just enlarging areas that I thought was quite expressive from my summer work as I just wanted to experiment to see what I could produce and if it would work or not. with these two I prefer the eye piece as its more realistic and in better proportion than the other work. But with both of them I find the mixture of material I used to create the pieces looked effective as I wanted a texture affect in my work as I never want to see my work looking dull and flat.

Emotional responses from my summer piece's



Wire sculptures on paper  

These pieces all represent the 3 feelings that I got from my summer pieces. The 3 feelings was sad, Anger and confusion. I tried to represent these emotions in a vary of materials, here are just a selection of my pieces that express them emotions.








Charcoal and watercolour on paper

Watercolour on paper

At the beginning of this project I was struggling on what to produce but with just experimenting I created these pieces that I find visual pleasing that are all different but quite the same due to the colour pallet I used as I only used colours that would resemble them 3 emotions.

I also produced artwork that I created by making a set of rules and translating them into artwork but I found this boring and irritating as I wasn't in control of the work I was making and it just looked rubbish to me.

Overall this project got me to just experiment and mix materials together but it also made me produce artwork that's not me as I want to create work that I'm excited about and interests me, as if I'm not intrigued about my own work why would I expect a viewer to be.



Strengths & weaknesses 

Strengths 

• Working and experimenting with a mix of materials.
• Working in a vary of sizes.
• Creating artwork that's all quite individual. 

Weaknesses 

• Creating work that i'm not visually happy with.
• Not experimenting with 3D work.