Looking at the possibilities

Those of you who visit my blog from time to time will have read that I’m exploring mark making once again, and working on getting back to the confident colors and marks I was producing while studying at TLC. I’ve been concentrating on black, white and red in a variety of media. It feels good to limit my color choices, but expand the tools I have in my hands – oil pastels, water-soluble crayons, acrylics, watercolor, charcoal…

I’ve made some fairly big works and have been playing round with them in Photoshop, seeing what they’d look like cropped down, as thin slivers, as squares etc. What happens when I get right down to the small details so the overall image is lost and only the mark remains? These and many other possibilities! Apart from the learning that comes from that kind of exploration, which is useful in itself, I’m also keeping an eye out for ideas that can translate into greeting cards etc as there are one or two new outlets that have expressed interest in my work.

I’ve also been wandering round the Internet looking at some of my favorite artist’s work, and exploring some new ones too. I always come back to Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rothko, de Kooning and Twombly. I suspect my interest in their work partly stems from the fact that we studied them at TLC so that I got very familiar with their work and feel ‘comfortable’ with it. But it’s more than that too – it’s a deep sense of connection with the way they made marks and with the way in which the hand of the maker could, or couldn’t, be seen in their work. Contemporary artists whose work I follow include Tina Mammoser, Vivien Blackburn, Martha Marshall, and Rebecca Crowell. Although all quite different, I think it is their interest in mark making that keeps me going back to their blogs or websites year after year after year. I have a small collection of small works by Tina Mammoser and Martha Marshall and adore them, and add to the collection when I can. Sure, I love the images they produce, the colors they use, or the way they tell their stories- but underpinning all that is a backbone of mark making.

So, here’s a taste of this week’s art: I hope you enjoy.