Summative Drawing Assessment

Self-directed Drawing Statement:

I went on a train journey from Leicester to London and quickly drew whatever shapes caught my eye, some within the train, most from outside the window. When I got back to the studio I started experimenting with what I could do with these shapes, how I could compose them. I immediately thought of last terms work and began to build on that using these new shapes, to explore that style of composition, which I found from Kandinsky’s work. I used watercolours at first, focusing on basic black lines with fill in colours. When I showed this to a fellow student she said it reminded her of Joan Miro’s work, I have looked at Miro’s work in the past and saw the link straight away.

I experimented a lot with mediums such as, acrylic paint, string and soft pastels, even wire. The way I was working seemed to revolve a lot around colour and line, I wanted to try working on either line or colour separately, and see if it was possible, for me, to keep it separate.

I played around with many ideas, after my last drawing critique about where I could take my project next. How I could finish it, what I could do to finalise this project and make the shapes more interesting to a viewer. I thought about doing an installation, and I thought about the use of reflection and mirroring the shapes, the positive and negative of the shapes on the paper and focused on the lines of each shape, instead of the colour, which was for me a distraction.

That massive 4m long piece I did for my critique at the start of March was my way of rebelling against the shapes, I did it to try and refresh my view of them. But after I still felt lost with where I was taking my work, so I went in the opposite direction, I went back to A4 black and white tape on paper. I was enjoying the lack of colour and just focusing on line, I like drawing with the tape. However I was still experimenting with different compositions and decided that I needed to roughly sketch some ideas for compositions down - working from pieces I had already done, what didn't work and what did.

I did some experiments with tape on canvas but it wasn't sticking, even with the help of glue. I chose to abandon the tape because I still wanted to use the canvas and so I then decided that I would paint the canvas in white gloss paint, to get the shine and smoothness I was getting from the tape. I decided this would be my final piece. I felt that however this canvas turned out, I couldn't take it any further. I still liked the idea of the uncontrolled paint in the background of the shapes, but I'm very much focusing on line now so I decided to drip paint down the canvas instead of splatting it randomly.


I've then chose to add bits of fabric (lace, ribbon, string) - anything with an interesting texture, that was able to make a line. It didn't matter what colour or thickness each best fabric was, actually the higher the range in thickness and colour the better. I placed it slightly off the centre of the canvas I thought it would be more intriguing to the viewer. I'm focusing very much on line and texture in this piece, and perspective – I wanted the viewer to feel like the all the lines where coming from under the white circle in the middle.