Jamais Vu, 2021, oil on canvas, 200x200cm
Planning
Day 1:
I felt the best way to start this Residency was to try to plan and explain what I will be doing through this next week or at least try to. I am now starting a new painting. This is a sort of diptych with my previous painting “Jamais Vu”, in which they would be exhibited in different rooms.
My idea is to do an experience where a person first sees the painting Jamais Vu in a dimly lit room with a spotlight illuminating the white circle. Then, this painting I am now starting will have the exact same composition and size but with a very dark circle where the bright one stood with a bright circumference, which represents a black hole.
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My goal is to have the bright circle be "printed" in people's retinas so then when they walk into the dark room, they still see the bright circle and once they start adjusting to the darkness, that print starts to disappear and the person starts to see the black hole, simulating the death of a massive star, condensing the life of a star in a few seconds. In a way, the work of art would not be the paintings per se, but the experience of what happened in our eyes.
Sketchbook pages: sketch for the dyptich paintings
Disclaimer: Despite my plan for the week is to keep working on this project, my priorities may change, so I might end up doing works that I did not anticipate.
Day 2
I already primed the canvas with a few layers. However, as I plan to exhibit it in a very dark room, so that it takes you about a minute to start noticing the lighter values of the painting, I thought I might leave the white circumference unprimed, so that it is as light as it possibly can. Also, due to the trial and error it will take for me to nail the experience, I thought if you cannot indeed see any composition in the dark room, I thought I might put a dim light behind the canvas so that the only white unprimed circle would ever so slightly glow.
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I am now thinking that if I end up putting the light behind the canvas, it will disperse a very little amount of light, “framing the canvas” with light.
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I decided to prime the canvas with thick brush strokes in the middle. This was because I want the paint to have so textures and I will play with the different tones of black, and paints and pigments, so that the end result has some interesting qualities, despite not being able to tell once the painting is exhibited.
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Sketch of the circle
Primed canvas
Close-up of the primed canvas
I decided to give some texture to the primed layer inside the circle, so that the texture would actually help the paint to look darker, by reflecting less light.
Day 3
Today I started by applying the first layer of the painting. As per usual, I covered all the canvas with paint just to get familiarized with the composition. In the very beginning, I felt some urgency to paint the black circle, so I could react to it will I painted around.
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Painting process
Also, once I was getting near the black circle again, I felt the painting would need to show some colours beneath all the black. However, I was feeling reluctant as to how to treat this painting, from a technical point of view, since it is supposed to be exhibited in a very dark room, so the only thing the observers will be able to see is the contrast of the values and not specific details per se. Despite this, I do believe that for the painting to be successful, it must work both in the dark and in the light.
Painting process
Painting process
From now on, I will continue to add details and take others, in order for it to start to make more sense. Having said this, the changes that I make daily will start being less and less perceptible.
Close-up of my painting process
Day 4
After wanting the use of colours in the lighter part of the painting, I started thinking about if there could be a real relation between the colours and the theme of the painting, this being a black hole.
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I am considering adding colours related to the colours you see when you rub your eyes, since I want this work to play with the way the eye perceives light, and this would just add to that connection between the two.
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However, I am still not sure with I will go forward with this idea, because it might add more unnecessary complexity, shifting the way people read the painting into a less ideal one.
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“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
- Albert Einstein
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Last week I ordered stretchable fabric to keep exploring one of the work I started in Portugal before being able to come back to the UK, the singularity.
The intent of this work is to try and represent an element of physics, so that Nature would be “frozen” in a specific work. A singularity in physics is a specific point with infinite gravity and infinite density in the fabric of space and time, creating a hole in it.
sketch - Singularity
Day 5
I started the day by stretching the new fabric on the already assembled 60 by 60 cm stretchers. I intended this canvas to be quite loose, so that the fabric bends more easily.
While I was in Portugal, I did a small study of this work to see how the materials would react and if the idea would work other than in my head.
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Views from the small study - Singularity
After having done this, I noticed how the inside part of the stretchers was quite visible through the canvas due to the inward direction of the fabric. However, I believed that in a bigger scale, this would not happen since the fabric would only start to bend further way from the stretcher.
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Having said this, it looks like this is going to happened again. Now, I am not sure if I should re-stretch it to see if this does not happen again, or if this will happen whatever I do.
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Also, unfortunately it was only when I got home from Camberwell that I noticed that I forgot to take pictures of the stretched canvas.
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I ended the day by painting continuing to paint the black-hole painting.
Painting process
Day 6
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I started the day by deciding that I would indeed re-stretch the canvas so the inward curve would be smoother. It is already working so much better, I honestly had no idea that it would make such a difference, so I am happy that I decided to stretch it.
Views of the re-stretched canvas - singularity
Even though the stretchable cotton that I got for this work made it sometimes easier to stretch, it made it so much harder to do the corners right, which its visible in the images above.
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After stretching the canvas, I started the process of pulling the centre point of the canvas, by making a stitch in it and using a thread attached to a gesso bucket that I had hanging around the studio.
Views of the stretching canvas - singularuty
However, this was a slow and steady process, since I did not want to make a hole in the canvas want did not know how much pressure or weight both the canvas and the stitch would take. So I started by leaving the gesso bucket on top of a box, and it was only a couple of hours later that I was able to put it on the floor.
Day 7:
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Conclusion
Today, I started my day in the studio in a different way. Instead of beginning with the more practical side of this residency, I felt that it would make more sense to start with me writing about what I aim to do.
As I started yesterday the process of pulling the centre point of the work singularity, I can only wait for time to do the rest. I will however, see if I can tighten the thread a bit more so the canvas can stretch even more.
Also, I will continue to add layers of acrylic on the black-hole painting and try to soften the edges of the black circle in the middle. I might even try to blur the circle a bit, which I am a little reticent about, since I could lose the real edges of the circle and end up distorting it until it no longer seemed correct. Not only that but the grey-ish colour that would result of their softening might not be the best for the composition.
This residency was more about my practical work than my research because as I was stuck in Portugal for three and a half months, I had a lot of time to research and think about my next projects, which now I am more focused on executing.
However, my method of painting is slow, because I tend to react to what is marked before in the painting. Sometimes I paint hours on end, and other times I just apply a few brushstrokes if any. I only paint when I feel I will enrich the painting and so, I try to be very conscious about when and where to paint.
In the next weeks I will strive to keep the work rhythm and will to work that this residency gave me and try finishing the projects I started here and more.