Tag: Experimenting

Artquest 30/30 Day 26 ‘Share your hack for being an artist’

The hints get more and more obscure but I think I can see where they are going. After much discussion with Mr Google (we are becoming quite good friends), I came to the conclusion it was about sharing any tips you have, what keeps you going, what is the secret of success. I’m not sure I’m the one to share any tips, especially about success, after all I signed up for this challenge as a result of being ‘stuck’. If I did have one tip though it would be take inspiration form wherever you can get it. There are many artists whose work I admire but they don’t necessarily inspire me to go out and make the sort of work they make; wildlife photographers for example. Our local camera club has a number of members who make absolutely beautiful wildlife photographs but I have no desire to follow suit. And whilst most of my photography is landscape based, I don’t want to get up before dawn to go and make the same photographs that many landscape photographers make. I want to do something different.

A few years ago we were on holiday in Avignon and I spotted that the local art gallery had the work of some famous painters so off I went to take a look. I have never been so disappointed. It was small, darkly lit and the artwork really did nothing for me. Chatting to the receptionist at the hotel, she suggested I also visit the ‘Collection Lambert’ which is the museum of modern art. I went along without expecting too much as modern art ‘wasn’t really my thing’, but what a revelation! Yes, there were some exhibits that could have been made by a 5 year old and lots consisting or just words that I couldn’t really get my head round but this is where I was introduced to Land artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, French artist Claire Tabouret’s The Lookouts and Detanico and Lain’s Ulysses, which blew me away. The exhibitions were very varied in terms of style and content and so refreshing, I have never since said that modern art isn’t my thing and whenever in Edinburgh, head for Mod 1 and Mod2 in preference to the National Gallery. I’m not suggesting that we should all go out and study modern art, just that we keep an open mind and be prepared to immerse ourselves in something different as invariably something will rub off and fire up the imagination.

This work is a composite of work inspired by some of the artists who inspire me. They mostly work in ICM, multiple exposures, alternative processes such as cyanotypes and Photoshop techniques such as stretching pixels.

Artquest 30/30 Day 25 ‘Use someone’s 30/30 post for inspiration’

I do try to scan through some of the other 30/30 posts every day. Some inspire me, others look as though a child has made then in about 5 minutes but I guess that is the nature of art and the guidance does say you can spend 5 minutes of 5 hours! One person whose work does intrigue me is a contemporary artist called Robert A Ireland. Much of his work is quite abstract and mainly, mixed media on wood but what caught my eye over the course of several days was a series of grids of cloud formations. I haven’t researched the thinking behind this work, that is something for when this project is over but I am now following him on the Artquest network.

It is my intention to make a book of my 30 pieces of work but that isn’t something I can do in a day. Robert’s grids on the other hand is doable so here is my 30/30 work to date, presented is a grid, to be continued.

Artquest 30/30 Day 24 ‘Make your art from your biggest stress’

Where do I start? I stress about every thing, mainly because I’m trying to juggle too many things at once, I hate saying no and I then expect everything to be perfect. Taking on two arty projects at the same time without giving something else up is a good example of that! Somehow I need to find a path through all the chaos and working on composite images a c0uple of days ago gave me the idea for this. The original photograph was taken at Bixlade, in the Forest of Dean and this is layered together with a cyanotype of oak leaves and blended in Photoshop. Maybe there is a path through the chaos!

Artquest 30/30 Day 23 ‘The future of art’

Today’s hint is ‘The future of art’ and that is the 6 million dollar question isn’t it? An artist’s life has never been easy and with all that is going on with AI, people are understandably, feeling more vulnerable than ever. As well as the artquest 30 works in 30 days challenge which I am thoroughly enjoying, I am also doing a 52 week challenge with Anne Brooks ‘Bobbin along’, where we are given a word to respond to each week and this week’s word is ‘hidden’. My mind linked the two. My artwork has traditionally been fairly standard photography based but more and more I am spreading out in different directions. By hiding a St. Christopher in my 52 week stitching project, I’m hoping for a safe journey wherever it takes me.

Artquest 30/30 Day 22 ‘Give in to your responsibilities’

So I could have just abandoned this challenge and gone and done the ironing but I’m over 2/3rds of the way there so not stopping now! When I searched the definition for this hint, I came up with things like ‘commit to something you have undertaken to do’ and it got me thinking about a project I tentatively started a few years ago, based around the iron industry in the Forest of Dean. I had been inspired by a photographer called Toril Brancher who was appointed Artist in Residence at LLwyn Celyn when the property was being restored in 2018. Rather than documenting the restoration, she wanted to find a link between the many generations of people who had lived in the property over several hundred years and focused on the plant life around the property for her project which she called ‘Could the grass remember?’ Whilst there is lots of information, including photographs of the coal industry in the Forest of Dean, there is very little about iron, even though it had been a main source of industry for many more years, since Roman times up until the early 19th Century. What hasn’t changed though is the plant life and this is where my work had started. My thinking was that I would use cyanotype to record the plant material and where possible, photograph where mines had been and somehow bring the 2 together. Early experiments seemed to work ok but by this time, I was coming to the end of year 2 of my photography studies, covid landed and that’s when I came to a halt.

My task for today’s work was to make another composite using some of the images I had made back then and maybe, just maybe, I will pick this up again and see where it goes. So today’s image is a wet cyanotype made from ferns collected at the Scowels near Bream, at a place known as the Devil’s Chapel and combine it with a photograph taken at the same place at the same time and modified in Photoshop.

I like the image, particularly the rust or iron effect produced with some of the filters in Photoshop but the photograph taken on the day doesn’t come through clearly enough, so whilst this meets the brief, it is back to the drawing board to see it this project still has any potential.

Artquest 30/30 Days 18 and 19

I have a few days to catch up on so will do a few in the same post rather than separately as I don’t have great deal so say about some of them.

Day 18 was a case in point. The hint was ‘Make it green‘. My interpretation of green was environmentely friendly,but I got stuck with that so reverted to some work in progress, which was partly green and that I needed to get finished. A Mariner’s Compass that I had started at a workshop using a technique called Foundation Paper Piecing. I had done a little bit in the past but our tutor introduced a different way of working which I found quite tricky but having got the hang of it, actually quite like it.

I needed to get the piece done before Friday when we had out next meeting so this was an ideal opportunity to work on that. I had already done 2 of the 4 blocks so another one achieved my challenge and only one left to do to complete the work.

Day 19 hint was ‘Make your work commercial’, which I chose to ignore because my artwork is my leisure time and if I think of it in commercial terms it becomes too stressful. Instead, I went back to some infrared images I had taken a few weeks ago but not got round to processing and I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the result. I had always been told that in order to take decent infrared images, you needed sunshine. Not so. A few months ago I listened to a talk by a photographer who does quite a lot of infrared photography and he said, you can take infrared in any conditions, you just get different results.

Clearly this image needs to be processed but you can already see some definition in the sky so I thought it had some potential. You never know what you will get with infrared though so the end result was a pleasant surprise. A number of people have thought it was a frosty morning but no, just another grey day.

Artquest 30/30 Day 14 ‘Domesticise your work’.

Another obscure hint, does it mean make something you can use for domestic purposes or the focus of your work should be something domestic? I have gone for the latter, the ironing.

I mentioned in an earlier post about an upcoming workshop on multiple exposure. Well on Thursday we had a short Zoom session with the tutor prior to the workshop, to make sure we could get out cameras set up in advance. This includes exploring multiple exposure settings but also creating different custom white balance settings. The idea being that we will learn to create weird and wonderful abstract images. Having really no idea what I was doing, but excited by the prospect, I decided to have a go with the ironing pile.

Maybe I should just wait and learn to do it properly 🤣🤣. Day 14 done though, I am now half way through.

Artquest 30/30 Day 5 – Boring but necessary

Some months ago, about 18 to be precise, I bought a new Ultraviolet lamp for my cyanotypes and gum bichromate prints and I have done nothing with it since. The main reason being that for printing, it needs to be hung with the light facing downwards onto the material to be printed and I needed to get a bracket of some sort to hang it onto. It recently dawned on me that my tripod has a boom arm allowing you to photograph with the camera facing downwards, and this is perfect for what I need.

The lamp is quite heavy but I have been able to balance it by hanging a sports weight from the tripod end.

This lamp is more powerful than my old lamp and the distance from the material being printed is different too and varies according to how the tripod is adjusted so I needed to make some test strips before I could move on to the real thing. I used 2 different papers as a starting point and exposed the first one 3 minutes apart, the second 5 minutes apart and based on those results, the final one with the S shaped hooks, for 8 minutes, which looked about right.

All papers are different and require different exposure times, so tomorrow’s job is to do some more test prints using digital negatives, fine tuned with a customised curve for cyanotypes produces in photoshop and hopefully after that, I will be ready to make a proper print.