#I thought I'd try and work with a different sort of pallette

[hehulk]

He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter - the boy who lived!’

[raychesshittyart]

I followed the same technique of painting, using a pallette knife as I really liked the affect. Although, instead of a full body figure, I decided to go with a more traditional self-portrait direction. I wanted to see what it looked like, but I also felt that I needed to do something slightly different. Having paintings that solely focused on full body figures was great, but was getting repetitive in a sort of boring way, at least for me, because it was repeating too much. Repetitiveness is great, and works really well, but having more than one book doing the same thing except different colour palettes and positions was starting to veer off the point. Maybe.. I don't know, I think I just needed change and here it is.

I wasn't sure if she was finished yet, so I asked Cass, a classmate who is very well practiced in self-portraiture, for advice. She noted that I needed a bit more white, and although the background doesn't hold any white in it and I want the figure to blend into the background, I thought I'd try it out anyway.

[recliningwomanonleopardskin]

Wednesday Lecture // Jacqui Hallam in conversation with Dan Howard-Birt - The format of this lecture was really interesting, Ben asking Jaqcui questions throughout made it a lot more insightful. I think we got a lot more information about the way Jaqcui works by it being done in conversation. It was also great to learn more about what The Royal Standard is from Ben, the oppertunties they offer and how it came about. Hearing Jacqui talk about the progression of her work through from being an undergraduate to present gave a good insight in to the way that she thinks and her awareness of materials. I found that I definitely preferred her early work she made whilst studying at Devan university, but felt as though her work became a lot less interesting when she left there to do her masters at the Slade. Her interest in paint and visual language shown through really well, but the paintings she made during her degree show a much deeper more direct observation of how paint reacts with different surfaces in my opinion. There seemed to be more of an interest in the chemistry and physicality of paint whereas the later work seems a lot more decorative, more a process of making backgrounds and drawings then combining them. There doesn't seem to be any workings out or development to the more recent works, more a process of painting a surface (a background as she called it) and then copying something linear on to it. This seems quite straight forward and flat, especially as she said that to make these backgroundw whe applied paint with no thought. Jacqui compared her process to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings which was interesting but I don't think I'd compare the two. She reffered to some of them as 'pictures' and I don't know how to feel about this. From seeing the processes she uses to create her recent works, they do seem a lot more like pictures than artworks. A lot of them lead me to question why it is she reproduces the drawing on to a backround to create a picture. They seem purely decorative without much consideration of colour, space, composition or how the works might fit together. There is a lot going on in the later works, they are very busy and to me this isn't very appealing. In my opinion, because of the nature of her work, it being so organic looking, expressive and playful , the way it's displayed makes it look rather messy. It's a bit overpowering and makes it look as though there's nothing to hold the work together or take the viewer on any kind of visual journey. I visited the work on display in The Walker to give it another chance, after not paying much attention to it when seeing it at The John Moores Painting Prize in 2018. It still didn't interest me and I found the colour pallette was even less appealing in the gallery space than in the slides, especially with it being near such vibrant, controlled paintings in the gallery. Despite all of this, the early work she shown actually inspired me a lot, I was really drawn to her works that had some kind of control and structure to them such as the chemical paintings. These were in grid formats that combined chance application with drawing which held the work together a lot more. These works create frameworks to withhold the paint and chemicals and act as a sort of window. This is something quite similar to what I try to do in my own work, creating a format to withhold surfaces and fragmemts of the urban environment but trying to get some sort og balance in this without overdoing it. This is something I've always been interested in. In Ariel S...'s Q&A last term he also spoke about this and said he believes that knowing when to stop is what makes an artwork. When Jaqcui was talking about her work she said that she felt she couldn't get this balance right between the chance elements and the deliberate elememts. Overall I think this is key and what would make the paintings more successful, like her earlier paintings are.