Rebecca Moughty

LSAD B. Ed🌻 Currently looking at restricted movements and the monotony of life in lockdown through the mediums of paint, print and sculpture

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☁️Project Statement☁️

For this project, I wanted to look at the lack of movement happening around the world right now due to covid restrictions. In order to do this, I decided to focus solely on my experiences being “trapped” within the four walls of my bedroom.

I had a hard time starting this project as the lack of materials and a lack of motivation took over my headspace. I decided to use these feelings however to my advantage and started to look at the idea of being stuck and trapped using what I had around me.

For this project, my three electives were Painting, Print and Sculpture. Out of the three, I found Painting to be the one that I enjoyed the most and that I wanted to work on more. I found Sculpture to be my weakest elective. This could have been because of my lack of resources and frustration with the constructing process. Despite this, I found all my workshops, seminars and tutorials to be very beneficial and they provided me with some good ideas for creating art at home with little to no materials.

Despite my trouble at the beginning, I feel as though I produced more work that I was proud of during this project than I did last semester. I felt like I understood what was being asked of me better and I better understood how the project is marked and looked at. I made sure to book tutorials with my tutors from all my electives throughout the process and found that this helped me immensely.

Overall, I enjoyed the process of doing this project and am proud of the pieces I have managed to create😊

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Ideas Development Book

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Initial Research Notebook

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Artist Research: Mark Loughney

Before he went to prison, Mark Loughney used water colours and acrylics to create bright, playful portraits of his favourite musicians. After he entered prison, he began to draw what was around him, but instead of depicting the bars and razor wire, he focused on the people.

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Artist Research: Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist, best known for his text-based paintings. Bochner’s popular thesaurus painting series consists of lists of synonyms displayed in rainbow-coloured palettes, often featuring a single word repeated in painterly capital letters. The work of Mel Bochner heavily inspired my use of text in my painting, where I repeated the words “stuck” and “trapped” using newspaper cutouts.

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Friends with Masks

For these drawings, I was inspired by a few artists. I started these drawing as practice for my painting, which depicts myself wearing a mask. However after doing some further research on some artists given to me by Sylvia, I decided to make them into something different.

For these, I was inspired by Joanna Hopkins’ piece “Am error has Occurred”, Don Bachardy and Mark Loughney.

Each of my friends sent photos of themselves wearing masks for me to practice drawing (inspired by Mark Loughney and Don Bachardys tonal portrait drawings). Around these drawings, I have included some images that remind me of the person I have drawn. Most of my friends from home, I haven’t seen since Christmas, some I haven’t seen since last March. In Joanna Hopkins piece “An error has occured” the interactive piece requires human interaction to function. We all need human interaction to function, and without my friends, I would not be able to function. This collection of drawings is probably the first time all my friends have been “together” since last March, but it is important to remember that this will pass eventually. That thought alone has helped probably a lot of people through these lockdowns 😊

(As you can tell, me and my friends are crushing on The Vision atm)

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Artist Research: Don Bachardy

Don Bachardy is an American portrait artist whose work contains portraits in both vibrant colour and black and white. After researching Bachardy’s work, I was inspired to some drawings, similar to his black and white tonal portraits. For theses drawing I used my friends as references and included some images personal to me and the particular person (next post)

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Final Painting

Here is the final result of my painting!😊

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Painting Process pt.3

This is the final part of my painting process.

I added text by using cut outs from newspaper. I used the words “stuck” and “trapped”. This helps to incorporate my print elective with my paint elective through the use of this collage technique.

I really enjoyed the process of making this painting😊 (final piece in next post).

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Typography prints

Following on from my Barbara Kruger inspired photo set, I decided to do something similar to that, but physically rather than digitally.

I printed off my photos and used markers and paint to add text to them. Originally I was going to do all the text in red, similar to Barbara Kruger’s pieces that are solely in black, white and red. However after finishing the first one in just red, I felt like experimenting with different colours.

I’m really happy with how they turned out and am glad that I experimented with other colours.

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Painting Process pt. 2

Here’s a timelapse of me trying to subdue the background yawing the othe rprimary colours, blue and yellow. I think it worked to make the piece less “horror”

To finish off the piece I want to add text. I haven’t figured out whether I want to do this with paint or maybe using letters cut out from newspaper.

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Painting Process

Here’s a timelapse of me creating my painting. As you can tell, I changed the background colour to red and kept the mask in black and white.

While I painted the background, I was using a red acrylic paint on a soaked paintbrush. This caused the paint to drip and made the piece a lot more sinister looking than I would have liked. To fix this, I decided to go in with yellow and blue (to make up the primary colours) in the same way to create a drip effect with those colours (next video). I found that this helped to subdue the piece a bit and make it look less like a horror piece.

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Painting Preparations

This week I watched Eoins video on preparing a painting. This is my preparation for my painting.

Firstly I made some initial sketches of what I wanted the piece to look like and made notes around the thumbnail sketches.

I then took a reference photo and edited it to the way I wanted it.

I have found that I am someone who makes slight changes to the piece as I go along (never anything drastic). I may change the colour of something or add an element to it that I find enhances the piece.

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Shadow Box pt. 2

For my second shadow box, I used the word stuck and projected it onto the corner of my room with my bed.

I edited the photo a few different ways, some focusing solely on the words.

I have one more shadow box to use, saying “Freedom”. I hope to project this shadow box outside. I haven’t had a chance to do so yet as it has been raining all weekend but hopefully today I’ll be able to complete this part of my project.

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Artist Research: Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool is an American artist. Wool’s art incorporates issues surrounding post- conceptual ideas. I am inspired by Wool’s use of text in his pieces. I hope to incorporate text into more of my pieces.

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Artists Research: Joanna Hopkins

Joanna Hopkins is a visual artist based in Ireland. Her piece “An Error has Occured” really inspires me. The piece contains a screen that appears to not be working. The body on the floor requires human connection to make the sceeen work again. I like this piece because it shows the importance of human interaction, something we’re all lacking during this lockdown.

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Artist Research: Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is an English artist, art collector and entrepreneur. Death is a central theme in Hirst’s works. He became famous for a series of artworks in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep, and a cow) are preserved, sometimes having been dissected, in formaldehyde. I was inspired by this particular series of works as they encompass the idea of confinement, being trapped, with no freedom. These pieces show my projects idea in its most extreme form.