MA Work | Paintings
Below are a summary of all blog posts about painting in order to collect my ideas about where my painting has been and where it might go.
The paintings I have made over the past two years are showing largely a shift away from landscapes into more emotional landspheres or emotionally charged spaces where I am exploring my own ancestry, interiority and feelings of belonging and loss. The work has shifted from an anthropocentric view with a horizon line into an exploration of places and spaces, with implied personal meaning and wider context. Below are some works in progress that I am developing in response to all of my MA thinking and most specifically recently my visit to the British Museum and the Admonition Scroll.
Below is a group of paintings finished during the course of this MA. Whilst I feel many of them describe the sorts of explorations that I am now pursuing as a result of my learning and the Research Paper, it is clear to me that the ‘tightness’ and unimaginative approach to ‘landscape painting’ was what was holding me back so much. The literal landscape, the horizon lines seem to keep my work away from a freer, more frightening, more frank exploration of self. There is however much there: the darkness, the indigo, the sense of troubled, difficult pasts and entanglements with grief processing both personal and collective. I don’t hate all of them but I am more interested in a freer form, a more expansive attempt to understand myself and my own situation, planetary, historical and geopolitical.
