My Utopia

Paint Experimentation

For this task, we were asked to develop the ideas we had done in previous tasks using the manifesto and utopia we had done before. Because most of my work was sculpture related, I wanted to try doing something a little more traditional, and so decided to try painting, which I hadn't really done in a while.

For my Utopia, I would have bright colours, and because my Utopia would have a lack of established hierarchy, I wanted to see if I could break any traditional compositional rules.

At first, I began simply by experimenting with bright colours and seeing what I could do with a paintbrush without putting too much thought in to it. However I quickly foind myself moving away from using mixed colours to using simple primary colours and geometric patterns.
I wanted to see if I could adopt the technique Wassily Kandinsky used, wherein he would paint without thought to the sound of music, but I found it very difficult to do. What I did produce in the end were numerous test pieces. By then I was fed up of using paint. 

The first test pieces were based off of one of Wassily Kandinsky's pieces, Squares with concentric circles.

I was experimenting eith opposite colours and with making circles without lifting the paintbrush off of the page. Rather than moving my hand, I was turning my wrist all the way around to get a circle.

For the second experiment, I chose to use a sponge, and painted it two different colours. The idea came from Mark Rothko's piece Orange and Yellow, as well as other similar pieces.

The next pieces was a development of the first experiments. I decided, that since I had a lot of balloons with me at the time, I wanted to experiment with interpreting the balloons in such a way that they weren't obviously balloons, but rather, shapes.

It was a quick piece that I didn't put much thought into, but I liked the outcome. Each different colour and shape represents the balloons I had around me at the time.

I decided that I wanted to experiment more with the sponge idea, however rather than sponging the paint on, I wanted to use blocks of colour. I chose orange and blue because they contrast each other, and decided on a black line in the middle because it would break it up. It was a last minute decision to add ink to the piece so that it ran across only one of the blocks.

Finally, the last piece was going to be something similar, however while doing it, I quickly got annoyed as it wasn't going as planned. I was just using all of the paint off of my pallet mixed together, and because one of the colours contrasted against the ones I had used as the background, I just painted a circle and put it in the middle.

It still didn't look right, so I started trying to shape the circle with white paint, and eventually just started flicking the paint onto the page. I feel that it improved the piece drastically,