#studio practice 2

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Mixed media on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm

I’ve still been struggling with priming my boards to get them so I can properly work on them so I went back to using paper whilst I figure that out. I wanted to make something with more than one figure so that I could see how different colours work alongside each other. My inspiration for this one was just my current feelings, as that’s what I’ve been wanting to include a bit more within my work.

Specifically I was thinking about my mental health, especially since it’s been affecting me quite a bit recently. Since I’ve suffered with my mental health for most of my life, I’m not really sure who I would be if I didn’t. Because of this, I often refuse to accept it or get help for it because there is something comforting about it to me, and I can’t really imagine myself without it. Even though I know that I’m capable of getting better I often don’t allow myself to try because it doesn’t feel right to me.

The blue version of myself represents that, offering me that kind of comfort even though it’s toxic. I did another sketch which I considered, but this composition was inspired by ‘The Kiss’ by Gustav Klimt since I really like this painting. I used spray paint again which I think worked quite well but I think I need to practice a bit more. The spray had clumps in some areas, particularly in the blue which are really obvious, but that’s just a case of practicing my technique. I’m not sure how I feel about the colours, maybe they’re a little bit too bold and I’d prefer them to be more pastel-y, to solve this I’m going to swatch all of my spray paints which will make it easier to visualise what they will look like. Another thing to add is that for some reason I struggled with detail and had to add it back in with coloured pencils, mainly to the faces and other crisp lines that it needed.

I feel like this piece may be a bit off topic in terms of the themes I’ve been exploring but I have discussed bringing more of my own experiences and feelings into my work so this seems like a way of doing that. I also keep thinking back to the text pieces I did at the start of the semester and how I can incorporate that into my work, but I don’t want to force it. I feel like this piece might be missing something so maybe I could add some text at the top but for now I don’t really know what would be the right thing to say.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Mixed media on board, 59.4 x 84.1 cm

Unfortunately don’t have a better photo due to leaving this in the studio.

After the recent research and experiments I’ve been doing I’ve had a lot of ideas about bigger pieces that I want to make, so I’ve been doing sketches to help me piece these ideas together and come up with compositions, ideas, etc. I was thinking about my research I had done earlier on about sexual empowerment and how I’d often do similar things myself and lie to myself knowing that I was acting for men but convincing myself that it was for me. I started to think about why I wanted this male validation so much and realised that it was where I got a lot of my self esteem from, as it is for many other people. With the common beauty standard being resemblant of a child (petite, no body hair clear skin, etc.), it is no surprise that girls experience sexual attention from a young age.

I wanted to think about my own experiences with this and how it has affected me, particularly in terms of the ‘loss of innocence’ I feel that I went through. At first I started to look at things that weren’t sexual acts but may have sexual connotations to show how things that aren’t explicitly sexual still have the potential to be fetishized. I did a small sketch of myself eating a cherry and wearing a pair of heart sunglasses on my head (often related to the Lolita image). This was going to be the basis of my piece but I decided I wanted to add more to it.

As I continued to research, I started looking into religious imagery, in particular the Virgin Mary, a universal symbol of innocence. She is often depicted holding lilies – a flower which I’d already done some sketches of, and with a ‘sacred heart’ on her chest. I decided that this is what I wanted to do instead so I took some reference photos of myself and drew them up on my board. I chose to use the version of the sacred heart with a sword through it, and draw the lilies as dead.

I decided to use spray paint again to get a flat, even colour to work on, I created a background of blue with a pink ‘glow’ around myself and left the rest white to work on top of. Unfortunately, I hadn’t taken enough care when priming my board and the surface wasn’t smooth enough for me to work on. After spending some time trying to sand down and prepare the white space, I eventually just left it how it is. I figured that for now I was just wasting time trying to save this one, but I have all the ideas documented to be able to come back to it in the future, probably over the Summer.

Although I’ve not done much on it, I’m happy with how it’s looking, mainly the background colours as I’m really drawn to the blue and pink colour scheme at the minute. I’m excited to come back to this and hopefully have it work out.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Makeup on paper, 29.7 x 42 cm

After my small colour studies that I was working on I decided to do a larger one. This time I used spray paint as a background rather than acrylic paint. This definitely worked a lot better as it created a really flat surface rather than having brush marks which the makeup really shows. I decided to go for pink again and did a much more detailed drawing. I liked how this one turned out and will definitely continue to work like this. Now that I know it works technically, I can focus on creating some more interesting, larger pieces with more of a concept to them.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Juno Calypso “Juno Calypso is a London based artist working with photography, film and installation. While studying photography at the London College of Communication, Juno began taking pictures of herself disguised as a character named Joyce. In 2015 Juno took Joyce to a romantic themed hotel in America. Posing as a travel writer, Juno gained access to multiple rooms which she used to stage her series of solitary self-portraits. Studying solitude, desire and femininity through a dark comedy lens. The Honeymoon was awarded an international prize by the The British Journal of Photography. For her latest project, What to do With A Million Years, Juno staged photographs in a mansion built underneath Las Vegas in the 70s as a shelter from nuclear terror, and currently owned by a mystery group attempting to achieve immortality.” Juno Calypso’s work reminds me of Juno Birch’s work and I really love it. As with Birch, I really like the idea of dressing up and creating characters within my work but there are other things that I like as well. Many of the themes present in her work relate to my own and I’m a big fan of the way she deals with these. Calypso looks at the construct of femininity and creates a character who embodies everything that we have decided that a woman is. However, she does this in a way that is over the top and comical which is what I really like. Her photos are all very theatrical and staged and it becomes apparent that this womanly figure is making a comment on the stereotypes we have created, they are ridiculous. This is something I have considered using in my work before but have never really known how to go about it so it’s nice to find an artist who does it in a way that I really like. I also find the colour schemes she uses very visually appealing so it might be worth thinking about using pastel colours within my own work, I feel like they’ll work well with the way that I work.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Sketchbook studies

As a continuation of my small colour studies, I did a couple more to see how they worked.

Orange: This was almost the opposite of the blue study I did but I think I preferred that one. Again I used blue to create shadows as it’s the opposite colour but I think I used too much as it just looks to intense against the orange. I think instead of using the opposite colour I should just stick to using darker shades of the background colour, but maybe it’s something I just need to experiment with more as in theory it should work.

Yellow: I used yellow as I wanted to try using a really light colour as the background, this is because I wanted to see what would happen if I used the makeup how I would on a white background but with a really light colour underneath. So, instead of a monochrome drawing, it is ‘normal’ colours, just not on a plain background. I actually quite like how this looks and would like to try it on a larger scale. I think it’s always quite difficult to tell whether it actually works on such a small scale because there’s a lack of detail which can make the drawing look bad, it’s then difficult to tell whether it looks bad because of this or whether the experiment didn’t actually work. In this case I think it’s just a lack of detail.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Sketchbook studies

Before I started using coloured backgrounds on a big piece, I wanted to see how it would work in a few different ways on a smaller scale so I did a few experiments in my sketchbook. I wasn’t too concerned about the drawings themselves, I was more interested in how the colours worked with each other.

Blue: To start with I tried using blue. I used blues, greys and purples to create darker tones but this didn’t really work so I tried to add orange since this is the opposite colour to blue. I’m not sure how well this worked I can’t really decide whether I like it or not. I think I’ll probably use blue again in my work so I’ll have the opportunity to use it more and see what works and what I like.

Pink: I also like the colour pink and wanted to feature this in my work so I did a small test. Again, I used darker pinks and purples to create darker tones but I also considered introducing reds. I didn’t use that in this drawing but like with the blue one I’ll try it again in a different way to see what works.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

Juno Birch I came across Juno Birch whilst doing some research and I really like her and her work. Although she is a sculptor, she is also a drag artist which is what I am particularly interested in. I have been reading interviews to find out more about her and her work, here is one of them: https://www.metalmagazine.eu/en/post/beauty/juno-birch She paints herself in different colours and dresses up, creating a new ‘character’ which she represents in her art. I think this is really interesting, I’ve obviously experimented with makeup in my work for a while and have used it on myself but never in a way as extreme as this, to convert myself into someone completely new. I really like the idea of this though, I think it allows for makeup to be used in an artistic way rather than in a way that accommodates the male gaze which I discussed earlier. The way she presents herself has also made me think more about the way I’m using colour in my work, which I have started to introduce recently. She stated that if she is wearing something lavender, she’ll paint herself a different colour like blue or pink. Although this seems basic, it has made me think that I should probably research colour theory a bit more as this will help me to understand which colours I want to use in my work. Going forward I’d like to look at possibly creating characters in my work, these could represent my feelings and ideas that I am trying to portray. I also think it would be quite therapeutic to use makeup to transform myself into an artwork. As well as colour theory, I want to look at what different colours could represent as I feel that this would help me to get my messages across in my work.

[abbeycallaghan-art]

X-Collab

I signed up to take part in the x-collab project, where you get partnered up with someone, you swap art that you have made based on a brief and then create a new piece based on their work. The theme was ‘blue’ and this is what I made in response, it is oil paint on canvas (59.4 x 42 cm). Since this wasn’t intended to be directly a part of my studio practice, it seemed like a good opportunity to try something completely different. I didn’t have any specific ideas when making this, it was more just an experiment with colour, but I really like how it turned out. I’d like to continue using colours in this way in my future work as I think it would make things more interesting and I could really play around with it.