Employability Week - group work

During Employability Week, we got put into groups  of between 7-9 people and ask to work in our groups for the week in order to make a presentation on the theme 'The Future'. We each filled in this sheet (top one, below) about each others current aims, plans for the next six months, one year and long term. As there was a range of 1st, 2nd and 3rd years, some of the older members had a clearer idea of there future, but a lot of the people from the same year had similar aims.  

 This SWOT analysis sheet (below) we filled in independently and then shared the results, which we're all pretty similar. We also discussed each others studio practices and gave are thoughts on possible ways to strengthen them. We then decided to use this sheet as inspiration for our presentation. 

We ended up doing a video presentation of our group playing the word association game, because the future - like the game - is unknowable and can take you anywhere. We started of using words from the sheet that seemed to crop up a lot, like: money, time, studio and future. 

Experiments of Composition and mediums

Untitled, A3, Watercolour paints on paper, Feb 2014

Untitled, A3, Watercolour paints on paper, Feb 2014 

Untitled, A2, Acrylic paints on paper, Feb 2014 

Untitled, A1, String and glue on paper, Feb 2014 

Untitled, A1, soft pastel on paper, Feb 2014

Untitled, wire on the wall, Feb 2014

Paul Winstanley

Book – art school

His uses oil paint on linen from a photo source. He’s been a professional artist from 1990 and is still creating work today; he started as an abstract painter – doing one colour paintings.

TV room V – life size, so the viewer feels like there looking in a mirror.

Black and white photos – before computers

Lounge – 5ft x 5ft in the uni

Cambridge residence for 1 year

Did two mirror images of reality

Messing around in the dark room – taking away the brushwork, just sits on the paper

Taxi office 1997 – layers/levels

Common/everywhere – normal

Places that you see everyday – it’s always there but you don’t really see it.

Tate show – student accommodation – alienated

Viewing room – it’s a double meaning

Images from a moving car

Landscape – flatness, empty, huge, impossible to frame

Liked driving through it – like a road movie, had an auto camera – drive in the evening, just from when the light was going

View from window

Light was different - 5.30am

Set it up – window view

Vanishing point – middle, walkway paintings

Removed the end – middle

Different paintings, walkways and trees – contrast

The more blurred the paintings – the bigger its effect

There is a person in the painting – the person viewing it -Standing in front of it.

Big – part of the space

Window – separates the inside/ outside – light, perspective. 12 year series

The room itself was like a light box – the floor was knocked, it had to be re-painted

Home office – curtains, anti bombs catches the glass of the bomb outside.

Little Finland

Benday dots

The darker the image the nearer it is to you.

Uses a sugar lift in his prints this makes the brushstrokes totally visible, its crude a sticky mark making technique

Art school – studio spaces, we are familiar to them and don’t notice them because we are always there

Panel – not stretched canvas

Paintings of almost nothing but very detailed

City moon

each painting takes 3-4 weeks, so he has about 8 on the go at once.

Inside psychology – symbolic to the outside world 

Experiments with collage

Untitled, A3, Collage of colour paper, Feb 2014.

Untitled, A3, Collage of colour paper, Feb 2014.

Untitled, Collage of 5 coloured sheets of A4 card placed together, Feb 2014.

Joan Miro

I looked at Miro’s work in relation to my self-directed project, however I do believe that it will also impact my drawing, as they are very similar. I find Miro’s work interesting because of his use of composition, the way the objects just seem to float there within a blank space. Sometimes the background is coloured, other times the paint is unevenly coated across the surface, which is normally a canvas.

I want to explore the shapes that I have taken from the landscape and turn them into something that’s fascinating and takes the viewer into another world.

I want to experiment with different colour background to take away that plain old white-ness. 

Henri Matisse

The Horse, the rider and the clown from the illustrated book ‘jazz’ 1947

The Snail 1953

Gouache on paper, cut and pasted on paper 

mounted on canvas support: 2864 x 2870mm

I was in a critique the other day and Matisse’s paper cut outs came up in relation to my self-directed work, so I decided to look into them more - hoping that it would spark an idea so I could take my work further. I started cutting shapes out of sheets of coloured paper and composing them on different types of backgrounds – plain paper, paper that I had painted and coloured card, trying different colours and layouts to see what works. 

The main inspiration that Matisse gave me was the scale that he works on. Some of his works are huge, easily taller than me – this made me want to work big again, most of the pieces I have done lately are A4 or A3. I want to do huge wall size pieces that you simply can’t walk past, I'm also want to try pieces on card or wood – something stronger than paper, it's too curly with all the glue.


A quality of The Snail piece, which is perhaps my favourite out of his cut outs, is the irony of it. The piece itself is huge (as you can see in the photo on the right) and colourful yet its of a snail - which is brown and dull and small.