Category Archives: Tutor report

Tutor report: Assignment 5

Overall Comments

Hello Patricia, thank you for submitting your work for Assignment 5 online. The work is clearly presented, as has been the case throughout the course, well done. All work has been presented in your online blog due to you currently living in New York and the postage being prohibitive. You have worked through all of the exercises on this section and have grappled with areas you have found difficult. You have worked hard and conscientiously throughout the course. There have been times when you have struggled with some of the exercises but you have kept working and tried different approaches. You have tried to push yourself out of your comfort zone on several occasions and have shown some willingness to experiment and explore the medium.

Remember the assessors will want to see evidence of experimentation, exploration and progress over the life of the course. I think you can confidently show that you have made progress and that your work has developed.

Feedback on assignment

Develop a series of paintings using methods and a subject of your own choice.
Establish what links the pieces. Before you begin think about

Size
Medium

As you start concentrate on observation and research of the subject

Prep work

Great that you had arranged to attend a life drawing class. And a good idea to use it as a basis for your set of themed paintings. You have done a substantial amount of preparation work and have thought about several different approaches to the final piece.

The series of five minute poses are a really exciting set of drawings. The energy is there, the subtlety of the tone in describing form has come through, really accurately rendered proportions , excellent Patricia. Much much more of this approach and experimentation would greatly benefit your style development. The male figure set of sketches, particularly no 8, are also interesting.

Final Assignment pieces.

Good that you identified a connection with de Lempicka and followed this up. Your notes on how you developed your work and ideas are very informative. There is attention to composition, medium, tone and abstraction. The pose you have chosen is a strong composition and you have also experimented with this to some extent. Each painting has its own qualities. The styles are very different and this was intentional. The connecting factor was the figure. I think it may also have been interesting to select one of these styles and try using it to depict a series of five different poses. I can see from your writing why you have chosen the different styles you have. As a series, 3 and 4 seem to work well together. And also 1 and 4. Think about this and how you might develop it. There are myriad combinations of painting that could be developed from this set.

I note you have gone on to do additional life drawing and have entered that on your blog too, good. Your work has come together well on this section Patricia, well done. Be sure to include all of the prep work and final pieces in your final submission for assessment.

Comments on some of the other project work.

It’s good to try new techniques and then incorporate them in to your existing style, to widen your own vocabulary of mark making and in order to develop what will become your signature in painting. Your own unique style will develop by exploring what marks you are capable of making and that feel natural to you. I can see you are exploring this throughout your work.

Drawing on coloured ground.

Despite you not being happy with how these two pieces have turned out, and I can understand why, I do still think you have clearly shown the effect of the ground on the final piece and this is the point of the exercise.

Tonal studies on a coloured ground.

Blue shoes on coloured ground. Final piece. Very accomplished. Lovely application of paint. Good use of the coloured ground coming through, excellent tonal qualities. Good rendition of the shoe texture.

The onions. Img 0851, despite looking a little like pomegranates I actually think this painting is really good Patricia. The application of the watercolour is beautiful. It is more fluid and confident than in the final image which has more detail. This is a lovely style. I would recommend you have a nother go at the two onions several attempts until you feel completely happy that they look like onions but still have this beautiful expressive paint quality. I think it is some of the detail which is a little too random, the amount of definition is perfect but where it is, is a little misleading. The brown squiggle on the right hand bulb perhaps needs to be done with a much smaller brush for example.

Collage exercises

Good to read that you felt you had learnt from this experience Patricia. You say that you thought it might be better to do the exercise first and then the research. The thing I noted here was that the research you did seemed to have little impact on your own collage, or at least in your blog you didn’t relate the research with the exercise. Was your approach influenced by what you had seen in any way? Please do make that connection in writing in the blog as this is exactly what the assessors will be looking for. Sometimes try things out that other artists have tried out in your own way and make a note when you do that.

Using resists experimentally.

Some beautiful and subtle work here Patricia in the flowers and the pineapple in particular. The portraits conceptually too are very interesting, ghostly pieces. Lots and lots of potential for further experimentation here!

Mixed media on coloured and white paper.

In img 0977 I can see you really beginning to pull together several of the techniques and approaches you have been introduced to over the course.

Img 1003 – the shadow on the right hand side is excellent Patricia, so soft and evocative of the edges of feathery flowers. Excellent.

Img 1008 – very unusual and effective technique. The pale blue wash provides a solid clam background and the use of the blue pen for detail gives a very illustrative quality to the painting. Interesting.

Img 1016 also very effective, the combination of wet paint application and the fine detail, works well.

Free expression.

You express your thoughts and concerns over the concept behind the Ebola piece very well. This is a worthy topic for research and exploration of people’s thoughts and fears and an interesting topic for a visual art project. I personally wouldn’t have guessed what this was about without a title. I think the spidery line work is definitely unsettling but the choice of colour makes me think more of a fairy’s. The use of wet blurred technique is good and effective but again, the colour needed to reflect more the feelings of anxiety, fear, despair. And the blue/pink /yellow combination doesn’t get this across. Dental surgery is much more effective from a colour point of view. Even though it uses some of the same colour scheme it is more intense, perhaps because they are alongside the black too. The sharp black lines also get across pain, and the blocks of yellow work well. As a stand alone abstract piece, it is quite child like in its delivery, but as an expression of emotions, which this exercise asks for it works well.

Magnification

Interesting series of work Patricia. I can see you are working hard here to develop the series. You experiment to some extent with different styles of watercolor paint application and mixed media. I think you are starting to get somewhere with it but haven’t quite arrived. Further development could have taken an even more magnified approach, very close up. However you are starting to develop a confidence with trying out different approaches here and the final image comes across as assured. The idea of making the rocks look watery by using a wash technique works well too. Good work.

Sketchbooks

I haven’t seen an actual set of sketch books face to face, I don’t think. Perhaps the first assessment? What I can see from the blog is that you do a fair amount of sketch and prep work. Much of it is commented on above. You will be expected to have several sketch books of varying sizes to send in to support your work for the final assessment.

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays Context

Your online logbook continues to be very comprehensive. You include gallery visits, and brief biographies/info on artists whose work you have come across. I don’t always look at the whole logbook in detail but have skimmed through most of it this time. I can see that you have reflected on other artists work. When you get onto the section about ‘Lightbulb’ moments you start to talk about how you might apply techniques and ideas in other artists work to your own. Excellent Patricia, this is exactly the way the assessors want you to be thinking as you continue your studies (and beyond). This needs to happen regularly. It is not always, by any means, essential to be thinking of other artists work when you make your own work, but at this stage as a student it is essential to be constantly learning from other artists and recognizing what it is you that you do learn from them. Sometimes their work subconsciously affects your own and it is not until after, some times a long time after, that you realise this. Remain open to it.

I think your comments on Kiefer’s work are insightful. He’s a very topical artist in the UK at the moment due to his retrospective at the Royal Academy. He’s an excellent example of mixed work too, and his watercolour sketch books are my favourite, they a pronounced fragility and vulnerabitliy. Look them up if you haven’t already seen them, particualry as several of them are books of watercolour figure work. Also look at Tracey Emins watercolour figure work. Though often not pleasant subject matter Emin is very good at capturing emotion in her application of line and paint in her figure work

As an artist, is some times hard to know what your own work is about (I mean all artists in general) , and at these times, it is just important to keep going. Sometimes it only becomes apparent afterwards what the purpose or point of the work is. At other times you have a definite plan in mind, but not all the time by any means.

Your reflective comments are well considered, your research provides you with lots of good starting points for future exploration. The blog is very good Patricia.

Pointers for assessment.

Read the notes online regarding submission of work and quantity of work to submit. The original handbook suggests 10-15 paintings or final work along with carefully selected preparatory work, including sketchbooks and learning logs. If you have further questions about this do get in touch.

Tutor report: Assignment 4

Overall Comments

Hello Patricia, I’ve spent time reading through your blog in detail for this assignment feedback. I can see you have explored ideas and approaches suggested by the course and that you are constantly questioning and reflecting on your progress. I think you have made considerable progress in this section but also appreciate, from your log, that it is not necessarily the sort of progress you had hoped for. I will comment on your assignment piece and some of the individual pieces below, and will attempt to address some of the points you have raised.

Assignment potential (after Assignments 2 and 4)

I understand your aim is to go for the Painting Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, and providing you commit yourself to the course, I suggest that you are likely to be successful in the assessment.

Feedback on assignment 4. Landscape painting from mixed sources.

This assignment requires you to work on paper that is A3 or larger. Compose a landscape that includes 3 of the following 8 aspects of landscape.

Linear or aerial perspective
Sky and or water
Trees or rocks
Animals or human figures

Prep work.

You have explored several of the elements above in your prep work for this assignment. I was a little disappointed at first to think that you were going to do an assignment piece based on a photo and a mobile phone photo at that and in fact your final piece is based on the mobile phone photo. If working from photos, I would recommend you take several photos from different angles, using the benefit of the camera to quickly frame and explore different compositions. Also do close up photographs of different elements, textures, changing light and changing positions of people. You would take 30 or 40 photos of different aspects of this setting and then print several off, enlarged to work with, pin them up on your wall and use them and onsite sketches to work from. You may have done this and if you have I would recommend that you print off and put the photos and sketches in to your sketch book along with any notes , ready to submit for your final assessment at the end of the course.

I was relieved to read in your blog that you had already visited this garden and done sketch work there at an earlier date and that you also, after making a start on the prep work, revisited the location. This gave you an opportunity to explore several aspects in more detail such as the linear perspective, and to some degree, aerial perspective with your study of the daffodils in the foreground, and also the qualities and techniques involved in painting moving water. Whilst your onsite work afforded you the opportunity to consider executing the final scene from different angle you chose to stick with the initial composition for your final piece and this is a strong composition.

Interesting prep work pieces are P1080029, which shows an understanding of the structure of the piece and P1080051. This is the most fluid and painterly version of the piece. The way you have had the confidence to suggest rather than painstakingly render detail gives a lovely freshness to the sketch. The actual qualities of the water colour medium come through in the larger blocks of colour and the way the two people are just about recognizable is more intriguing than seeing two detailed and described figures. The use of pencil lines in the mid ground and in some of the foreground (this could have worked well on the individual leaves of the daffodils to create aerial perspective, ) and yet none in the background emphasizes to some extent the aerial perspective. In this piece ideas and lots of different elements are starting to come together. I am aware that you have had to overcome some of the difficulties associated with painting outside and appreciate that feeling uncomfortable is not entirely conducive to creativity! However, it looks like the pencil sketches must have taken a considerable amount of time and I think you would have benefited from doing quick watercolour sketches, on even a small scale, with a travel watercolour set. You do note that you feel work done onsite is more spontaneous and has a different quality to it. You are doing well at gradually building your confidence in this area.

Final painting

This is an accomplished piece in many ways Patricia. It’s a complex scene with several different factors to bring together to give a coherent whole and I feel you have done this successfully. Technically you have covered all of the requirements set out for this assignment to a good standard. What I feel it does lack is energy, emotion or atmosphere.

I looked back to the work of yours that I thought had a real atmosphere about it , the interior apartments, the basket chairs and the colour and tone work you did in part 2, in order to draw your attention to the difference between that work and your assignment 4 piece, and that is how I came across the gallery Terraces work .

Terrace view I, II, III, III sketch 2 – . This work is excellent. I am sorry to say I didn’t see this last time. I didn’t realise I needed to look at the gallery as well as the blog. So I apologise for that and also the fact that I made a comment in your sketch book section saying it’s hard to get an idea of your sketch book work, that is still true to some extent but this work fills in some of the gaps for me. (I am just wondering how we can be certain that the assessors see all of this work as they will have less time than I do to get an overview. I think it will be important to send all of this work in, in sketch books for assessment.) These are wonderful pieces. Most of the gallery work I have seen, but there are some real gems here that I have not. I have to be up front and say that obviously at this stage , there is also the matter of taste to consider. I love work that looks quite frail and at times vulnerable. That is a personal preference, but I think some of the Terrace (and trees in central park) work really has a special quality to it.

Terrace view ii sketch 2 and terrace view II both have depth of field, aerial and linear perspective, beautiful fluidity of the medium, and lots of expression in them, they are similar to the watercolour sketch for ass4 that I commented on above. They are in my opinion accomplished watercolours and your job now is to recognize that and when editing through your work to make sure you recognize the qualities. What are your thoughts about these paintings in particular?

When you look at them in comparison to your final Ass. 4 piece which qualities do you prefer or not?

Feedback on other work in this section .

1^st Ave sketch in felt pen, despite lack of varying pen thickness this is a great drawing. Life energy and a vibrancy to it.

View on 1^st ave, watercolour also a great painting with lots of energy.

Out of the two Brooklyn Bridges I prefer the less defined.

Think about why you are drawing these views. Is there anything in particular that draws you to them? Is it because they are more private and you are less likely to be disturbed and this in itself is an interesting parameter for where you find yourself. In terms of a context for your work, think about this aspect. You are on roofs, under bridges, there are no people visible. What does this say about you too, as a person and an artist.

The skies are beautifully simple and effective.

The clouds paintings are very good. They are all beautifully rendered and it’s hard to pick one above the others but 10 is particularly simple and effective. You don’t seem to have translated this same style or approach in to your sky dominated landscapes. I wonder what the reason for this was?

Painting water. 2 and 11 jump out at me. 2 because of its simplicity and the evidence of the brush strokes adds to the energy of the painting. 11 has a life to it and the moving water is captured again with energy, and this is a strong composition.

Overall your pencil sketch work needs to have a much wider range of tones in it. It is all the same tone and this then translates in to the final pieces if you work from sketches. I think you would still benefit from doing much quicker and more spontaneous sketches just to develop your vocabulary of mark making.

The final human figure in the landscape, the picnic painting is very strong. It’s a more detailed style than your most accomplished pieces before but in this one you have captured a quality of light that brings vibrancy to the painting and the content of the painting suggests a narrative of some sort. The earlier human figure sketches have an energy about them too, good work.

Strawberries 1, lovely composition, depth of colour, beautiful manipulation of the media, a frailty to the painting which all add to its overall impact.

Cuba sketches, less evocative when they get tighter.

Sketchbooks

See comments above. Regarding pencil drawings and sketch work evidence required for final submission.

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays

You have reflected well on your approach to watercolour painting in this entry. You are also starting to think about how you might develop your work after the course as well as considering how what you’d hoped to get from the course has matched up with reality and you are contemplating how the course might be falling short for you in this respect.

There is less research and reflection on individual artists in this section but you have approached this thorougly in previous sections. In part 4 you are more concerned with the idea of what is abstract and that is a very good line of research to develop. In terms of studying the painintg degree it may well be something that you contemplate time and again.

I notice you mention style and how to develop your style in your log and that you also feel restrained creatively at times by the project briefs. I can understand and empathise with this. The water colour course is conventional in its approach. Hopefully part five will allow you a little more creative freedom and I think you will find that if you continue with the degree level 2 painting courses also allow more freedom in this respect. I think you can also do a more experimental level one theory course which encompasses several of the arts ‘The Creative Arts Today’ as part of your painting degree. It is largely theory based but does allow for some development of contemporary knowledge which can feed in to your practical approach on later courses. Taking for example your approach to landscape painting, or painting outdoors. You could choose to paint specific sorts of landscapes because the appeal to you in a conceptual way, a political way, an emotional way or a way that comments on the society around you. Think about these isuues when you are feeling restrained and see if they can add more to the purpose of the work for you so that it’s not just going through the motions of techniques.

Suggested reading/viewing

I’m going to take onboard your learning log comments not to overload you with input. What I want to try and do here is give you references to two or three artists who’s work may broaden your experience of what an accomplished watercolour painting is allowed to look like. And I hope that by seeing their work you might feel more confident to develop your own work in a direction that I can see you already have ability. The artists’ whose work you admire doesn’t always match with what your own style might be so this is something to be aware of.

Here’s an interesting blog to sign up to and this post on watercolour is a good place to start. http://makingamark.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/exhibition-review-rws-contemporary-watercolour-2013.html

I notice the Christine Berrington piece may be of interest to you style wise. Her website is down at the moment but it may worth looking out for it. The work of hers that is available to see on line is illlusrartion based, which is very different from the onus of the Painting Degree, however from a watercolour point of view it is worth looking at her illustration work of trees and parks in order to get an idea of how she uses greens and intensity in the greens to capture depth of field. Other wise much of this work is a little too graphic for the purposes of fine art.

Another interesting take on watercolour from last century.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/moynihan-dead-tree-at-nigadoo-lake-t06840

Also have a look at the work of Naiza Khan. For the style as much as the political content as I know you have touched briefly on this in your last log (politics ) and it doesn’t play a part as such in your own work.

http://www.naizakhan.com/gallery/shifting-ground/#!prettyPhoto[shifting-ground]/5/

You are signed up for the painting degree and whilst much of this level one course is about introducing you to some of the basic techniques in watercolour, you are also at a stage now where it would be good to start thinking about the content and context of your work as well as the style. Your uniqueness will come from a combination of content context and style. It can take a very long time to develop your own style but being aware of the changes in your work is a good starting point on the journey.

Pointers for the next assignment.

Reflect on the different approaches you have taken to watercolour over the course so far and consider which you feel most comfortable with.
In your log and sketch book start to consider context in your work and how you approach the set projects in a way that is personal to you.
Develop pencil sketch work tonally (think back to the drawing exercises in drawing 1, and the left hand work etc too) and consider how using that as prep work translates in to your painting style.
On this final section be brave, make mistakes, push yourself and have fun.

Tutor report: Assignment 3

Overall Comments

Hello Patricia, thank you for submitting your work for Assignment 3. You have uploaded a substantial amount of work to your blog for me to assess and feedback on. It is great to see the amount of preparation and research that you are doing, well done.

Feedback on assignment 3. Landscape painting from mixed sources.

For this assignment you are required to:

Use a variety of sources, such as plein-air work, photographs, written notes and pencil sketches, to create a landscape painting.

Prep work.

Very good to see that you are aware of the differences that come with scaling up work, (assignment 3 notes, learning log) .

Also good that you focus on a particular aspects of the overall painting in your sketches and try to work out how best to capture different areas in watercolour. A close study of each element of the painting is always worth doing. The charcoal sketch has a strong composition, you have captured an angularity in the branches which contrasts well with the curve of the road and the abbey is well positioned. It’s fine to do a sketch study in other media than the final choice of media to get an idea of where the main colour areas are and how they fit together but you do also need to do colour tests and prep work in the actual media you are going to use too. (I see now that this comes lower down in your blog)

The later posts with small sketches in sketch book are too small to see properly.

You have done a lot of work on the tonal gradations, composition of the piece, and three larger scale paintings. You have thoroughly explored several different aspects of this scene. To push yourself further I think you needed to try different methods of paint application at this sketch stage and more inventive approaches in terms of the subject matter. From your written log entries I get the sense you yourself want to push your work further but are not sure how to do it. I will follow this up further on in the feedback.

Final painting

Some good qualities coming through Patricia. First attempt. The background has worked very well and the contrast between the light background and the dark foreground is effective, the branches set against a pale sky really bring out the spikey quality of the branches. I think the mid ground possibly doesn’t have enough differentiation in it from the distance as it comes towards the foreground, the maroon makes it look more detailed towards the back. The marks on the road give the painting a muddy appearance and it is difficult to read what is happening in that area. The actual trees seem to merge into the road

Your second attempt is clearer, and the background even better I would say. I can see you have tried to differentiate more in the mid ground between distant and near mid ground (if that makes sense!) but I’m still a little confused by the central tree like stump. The one that cuts across the middle of the ‘s’ bend in the road. The road would change colour and become less intense in color as it goes into the distance.

Careful painted detailed observation of just one tree in the foreground and how that compares with the colours around it may help you to get a clearer understanding of how to paint the foreground. I don’t know about this image as I haven’t seen a photograph or the original scene, but sometimes tree trunks are a lot lighter than the foliage around them. I think you have learnt quite a lot from this painting Patricia about how to start looking at perspective in landscape. I can see from your notes that you too have picked up on many of the things I have mentioned and it is really good that you are aware of all these things. Despite you being unhappy with the finished result I don’t think that is necessarily a negative thing as you are working through techniques and starting to find out what works and what doesn’t.

I definitely think you would have benefited from sketches on the spot. Even quick watercolour sketches, there is always so much more vibrancy to painting in situe, but also you cut out all the unnecessary detail that can come when working from photographs and you just paint the main elements required to get a good sense of the scene. You mention using invention at one point in your blog in your prep for this assignment and I would like to have seen some examples of invention in the colour composition for example

Well done for having a third attempt. The foreground is much easier to understand now. And the mid ground is clearer too. However I agree with you that it is much pleasanter to paint with more freedom to interpret the subject and wonder slightly what stopped you from taking that approach here? How would you have done it differently with more freedom? I’m sure that is what I would have wanted to see.

Thank you for sending the photo through. It is as I had thought and that is that the trees in the foreground are actually lighter than the foliage around them. You have captured this much more successfully in the second and third attempts and it makes all the difference. Sometimes it is necessary to leave to some of the things in the actual view you are painting as they don’t really add to the painting. In this case I think you could have left out the green ivy coloured trunks as they have become more of a focal point of this painting and I’m not sure if that is what you wanted.

Overall you have rendered this image quite well technically. It doesn’t have the life and vibrancy of some of your past work, but that is probably due to the subdued nature of the colours in the scene anyway. Also I think you are at a stage now where you probably need to start experimenting quite a lot more with how you apply the paint. Try very quick sketch paintings in situe and see what this throws up. Suggestions of objects are often more accurate at capturing the essence of a thing than laborious detailed painting. Play with the paint.

Feedback in on other work in the section .

Fairly brief feedback here Patricia as I have given more extensive feedback on the three pieces submitted for assignment 3.

The bridge in Central Park.

I have read your own comments and agree with them all. I too would like to see you experiment with more abstraction. But I understand that it is difficult to know where to start with this. However your first A4 watercolour sketch has some thing of the bridge in it, yet is almost entirely abstract too. Look at this a little further. I have attached a painting of mine which is moving toward abstraction, but isn’t completely abstract, This is one way to approach abstraction. Try to get the bare essentials of an image and then try to feel the rest of what you paint. There are other more methodical approaches to abstraction too which I will include some links too example of.

The mangos

These are beautiful little paintings with life and vibrancy in the colour. The paint application is spontaneous and captures my interest and the different approach to the shadows is also a good exercise too. Well done.

The bottles.

This work is coming along really well Patricia. You are working very hard, exploring the capabilities of the paint and you very successfully capture the glassy and reflective qualities of many of the bottles here. The five bottles is a well composed painting. You have approached it in different ways, pre mixed and not. The brown bottles are particularly effective and the wet in wet here adds a lovely watery quality to the glass. Well done for your courage – as you note!

Overall you are being very thorough in your approach. I feel you tighten up a lot in your final paintings whereas your sketch work has a more fluid and energetic feel to it. This often happens, in P1070093 – there is a lightness to the painting, whilst still being a good painting this is lost to some extent in P1070099, can you see the difference here? This is still a good rendition with a variety of convincing green. The left hand chair is slightly awkwardly positioned and perhaps some of the greens could have been a little less intense as they moved towards the back to enhance the perspective but overall this is very good. P1070121 is very tight. Some of my feedback from Ass 1 is still relevant Patricia, read through it again and see what there is that you can still act upon regarding quick painting exercises etc. You have covered each of the exercises in Part two very thoroughly Patricia.

Sketchbooks

Commented on above. It is difficult to get a real sense of a sketch book from a blog entry but some of the work above is from the sketch book. My overall impression is that the prep work you have done for the assignment is very comprehensive. Make sure you also do lots of sketching generally Patricia, just to develop a drawing vocabulary and to increase confidence in bold composition and colour observation, this will all come in useful in abstraction too.

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays

Your research and reflection on the artists in the gallery visits you have made is very insightful. You question the motivations and compare their work with their contemporaries and do further research after your visits. This is excellent and exactly what you should be doing. You mention the German artist Frieseke and question how his work is so cheerful given the political environment at the time (World War). This is an excellent question Patricia. What I also want to know is, how do the current politics affect your approach to painting? How does it affect what you choose to paint and the colours you use? Is it at all relevant to your work or is it something else that influences your subject matter and approach, if so what? What would you like your work to evoke, question or record? When you discuss the work of other artists remember to think about how it impacts on your own work too and comment on this in your log. You mention you aren’t able to predict how this gallery visit will impact on Ass 3. Perhaps not, but do think about how it impacts on your approach to art and painting as a whole.

I am interested to read that you would like to work in a more abstract way and I would recommend you try doing this as part of the course work. Try and approach some of the assignments in that way, do two versions of exercises if you are not confident about submitting abstract work at this stage as a final piece. I would be very interested to see this. You are following up recommended artists and thinking about and commenting on their work, this is great and I think it will have been very useful in your progress in terms of deciding what you do and don’t like and the direction of your own work.

Suggested reading/viewing

Thinking about the abstract interest you have mentioned. Kandinsky, Georgia O’Keefe, Agnes Martin, Miro just for starters.

Admittedly not working in watercolour but they will give you an idea of how they used colour and composition. A more modern day approach would be Tomma Abts work and Tauba Auerbach http://taubaauerbach.com/works.php

I think at this stage it would be useful for you to look them up and read about their influences and how they approached their painting.

Pointers for the next assignment. You are working well Patricia.

Continue to experiment with the paint application
Be braver with taking risks in your approach to the overall painting, have a go at a more abstract approaches.
Try the loosening up exercises from ass 2 feedback
Keep up the very good work!

Tutor name: Lisa O’Brien
Date: 29/1/14

Tutor report: Assignment 2

Overall Comments

Hello Patricia, thank you for submitting your work for Assignment 2. You have submitted your work in digital form on your blog. There is a substantial amount of work and it is of a good standard. You are making very good progress.

Feedback on assignment

For this assignment you are required to:

Demonstrate your understanding of tone, colour, composition and the beginnings of a personal style.
Use techniques introduced in the exercises in Part Two.
Create even colours, use overlapping layers to create colour and tone.
Use a strong directional light.
Make several preliminary drawings.
Make a small colour study.
Label colours.

Prep work

I note you weren’t very enthusiastic about the idea of this assignment but that with further research you motivated yourself and actually took a lot of care over your preparation for it. My first thoughts are why did you position the objects in places that you found it difficult to sit, squashed in a corner on the stairs or sat on the floor. I’m guessing it was to do with the backdrop but it is quite important to be in a comfortable position. You have tried it in different media which is a worthwhile exercise. You have considered the format of the paper, different backgrounds, the outlines of the objects, drawn from several different view points and you have observed tonal qualities in the arrangement. You have also done several colour studies. I notice you haven’t really moved the objects around or tried alternative objects in the arrangement.

I think the pastel landscape composition is the strongest and the colour is rendered well here. The little brown jug in particular and the plant pot are consistently different shapes and sizes in relation to one another and the other objects. Just be aware of this.

Moving the arrangement to a different area afforded an opportunity to play around with the positioning of the objects. You did move things slightly but it would have been good to try out the jug on the left or the fruits on the right , or to take one off the plate etc. The final composition is quite strong but I would have moved the small beaker a little over to the right and the plate of fruit a little to the left rather than have them directly in front of the flowers.

The monotone painting works well and you white bloom masking is very effective in the prep work. You make a good effort of the building up layers approach. In the painting where you are trying to build up areas of washes I note you mention the shapes going awry due to a lack of pencil outlines. You can still draw outlines in very faint pencil to support the shapes of the objects if it helps Patricia.

Final piece

The final piece has some very good qualities. You have successfully captured the glistening surface of the ceramic jug and beaker and you have used the building up tone with washes technique very effectively here. The shadows from one object to another are very convincing as are the reflections between objects. The pale blue saucer with a terracotta rim is beautifully done. I think the vase of flowers is perhaps the least effective part of the painting as it doesn’t have a great dal of tonal variety. When you used the masking method in the prep work mentioned above you also added in a little bit of tonal work and this really adds depth to the flowers. You are right in saying that the green foliage doesn’t quite work and I think this could be because of the over painting and lack of definition in the outside shapes of the leaves. It might have worked better if you had done a general pale green area as a backdrop to the leaves (leaving a few areas of white for highlights) and then over painted darker distinct leaves in the foreground. It is hard for me to say without knowing exactly what the leaves were like in the first place. Also in your outlined painting (above on your blog) the red is much deeper in parts on the flowers giving a lot more tonal depth to the flowers.

I think that the fruit would have benefited from a little bit of individual close up study, you are definitely on the right lines here with the loose quality you have but have a look at the fruits in the link below by Claudia Hutchins, if you haven’t already, (I mentioned her to you in the last assignment feedback)

http://claudiahutchins.com/gallery/WATERCOLOR%20Still%20Life/target53.html

Look at the looseness of her paint application. It is about the paint, as much as the object. It is just a suggestion that is needed and it invokes the object as well as capturing the fragile quality of the medium and perhaps the essence of the time in which it was being painted.

Have a go at painting like this. Lots of attempts, and they don’t take long to execute. Just repeated attempts on one page until you feel you have captured the essence of an object. I think you are moving towards this in some of your work. Let the water and the paint do some of the work, allow some of the application to be left to chance and see what the medium does. Put water on the paper first and then drop paint in to it.

Note how vivid the colours are in Hutchins work and also in Paul Klee’s work (that you include in your log book). Different water colour pigments have greater intensity, the more expensive ones are usually the most intense. You will learn this as you continue to work with different qualities of paint and different colours. I can see that your use of colour in this section has become more intense than in part one. You are getting braver with the paint and it’s versatility.

Feedback in general .

You have covered each of the exercises in Part two very thoroughly Patricia. You definitely have some very good illustrative skills with watercolour and you are able to accurately render objects using the different techniques introduced in the section.

I think your work could be a little looser and you can afford to be more expereimental with how you put the paint on. This is level one course, it is a time for exploration, making mistakes and playing with the materials. To help you loosen up I think you could try one of two things. The first is to do paintings in one minute. Just give yourself a minute to render an object and see what comes out. Limit yourself to two already prepared colours and a pencil, a larger brush and a small brush and do a whole series of quick painting sketches – say 10. See what comes of this, (in your sketch book) and make notes – you could try doing the mango again and see how far you can go to just suggest the form and make it still recognisable. The second thing is to try painting with your left hand. This might sound ridiculous (unless you are left handed!) but try it and see what happens. Do quick sketches in paint like this and also 2 or 3 longer five minute sketches. Then compare these sketches them to the mangos you did for the first attempt at the exercise and see which you think have more energy and which have the essence of a mango.

Tone and composition. Interiors. Again you have worked very conscientiously and to a good standard. You have a good range of tones coming through in your work now, your drawing skills are very good, particularly your outlining work and some of your finished paintings are very accomplished. You have completed all of the exercises looking at light and shade in interiors and I think your paynes grey painting is the most effective, as you yourself note, in the capturing of light in a room. However the composition of an interior monotone, 34 x 48 cm is also an excellent painting. It has real character, you have certainly captured a certain light, despite your notes about the light changing all the time. The composition is nicely balanced. The choice of colour adds to the atmosphere of the room, which gives the impression of a timeless day, bright but calm and peaceful. A lovely piece of work. (One small note is the perspective is a little out on the bookcase on the right hand side).

Overall I think the remaining work in this series is of a good standard. There is room to increase the intensity of the paint still. The paynes grey with the grand piano, in this painting the piano is approaching the intensity of colour that it would be good to get in some of the other dark areas of the your interiors. The room at night shows very dark tones in the window and under the table but I think the darkness around the edges of the room may also have been more intense. Again hard to know without seeing the room but it would have added interest to the far right hand side of the painting had the light faded into the corners . And whilst the uneven surface of the walls adds interest too in this painting I wonder how intentional it is. I think it would be worth you trying a very large brush to put your washes on in an attempt to get them a little more even. Having said that these painting do have a very charming quality to them, a character which it would be good to retain and that partly comes from the brush strokes.

Warm and cold colours.

This group of paintings is very appealing. The simplicity of them makes them quite intriguing. They are like little snapshots in to a story or a puzzle that needs working out. The household objects mixed with the childhood memories works very well somehow in a conceptual way. However, I digress. The fact that you have used similar colour ranges, greens, browns, blues and yellows, throughout the paintings pulls them together and makes it seem like these are meant to be part of one piece of work. Your own observations are also very insightful regarding detail and boldness of composition. The lack of very warm colours such as reds /oranges is very noticeable but not necessarily a bad thing.

Ones from a single layer

Here you are achieving a very intense grey in your second attempt. (Great you had another go at this.)

You are puzzling over brush size in your log notes. Where the application works best here is on the right hand side at the top of the table. You see where the smooth block of colour has gone on, as we go lower down the table it starts to be come a little scrubby again, not fluid and on the left hand side of the table this is definitely the case . And then directly above the right hand side of the table is the paler grey behind and again this has gone on better, leaving watermarks from the brush to add an interesting texture

Third attempt. Definetly good to have a try out sheet. I often use the side of the paper I’m working on if I know it is going to be framed over , but that’s probably just laziness! The paint has gone on better here. I have to admit I prefer a little more contrast but I can see why you prefer the subtler approach too. I think this is definitely the most successful of the thee attempts regarding your brush work and the application of the paint. Much less scrubbing of the brush and a definite fluidity in the mark making. Well done.

A couple of other notes.

I think the following two images work very well

from a composition point of view, and paint application and general choice of subject

http://ocawatercolour1.patricia-karsten.de/?attachment_id=468

http://ocawatercolour1.patricia-karsten.de/?attachment_id=459

Both paintings are of ordinary spaces but have an atmosphere about them, particularly the first one. You have captured an essence of the place in the painting. In this first example this comes through with the shadow of the plant on the back wall and the reflection in the window. The sense of a bright lit room at nighttime, in an ordinary room, but it gives us a window in to someone elses world.

NB. The Winsor and Newton website (no plugging intended) is very informative in general about watercolours, pigments, transparency, granulation etc. Definitely worth a look at some of the simpler sections if you get a chance.

Sketchbooks

Much of the sketchbook work is commented on above. You do a good amount of preparation for exercises. Sketching is a way of trying to understand an object, place, feeling, a colour, how something works, how to capture a specific type of surface, it is like a visual representation of your brain trying to understand how things work and you are using your sketchbook to enquire in to the subjects and ideas you are painting for the project work. Remember it’s fine to draw anything and everything and not only things related to the course in your sketch books. You still need to be bolder in your drawing style – it is a little bit tentative. Regular sketching, alongside the painitng, just quick sketches, would be of benefit to you using pens, pencils, rubbers, and developing your mark making. Drawing can often be an important part of watercolour work.

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays

This is coming along really well. You think carefully about each exercise and note your discoveries. You also make notes on several artists for the research points. I think this research could be a little broader and I think it would be great if you could visit some exhibitions, particularly of watercolour paintings, and make notes on the work you see there. Visits to any exhibitions are always of interest and given that you are based in New York at the moment I hope you can find some time to fit some gallery visits in and reflect upon them. I would like to see you exploring other artists and also writing up and researching a little the artists mentioned to you in my last feedback.

Suggested reading/viewing

Did you get a chance to look at the work of the artists recommended last time? Could you make a few notes on what you think about their work and how they paint in your log notes.

Claudia Hutchins-Puechavy, Karen Armitage, Elizabeth Blackadder

Also have a look at Lucy Willis, her interiors and still life work are available to see here and also her African work, which I find particularly interesting.

http://www.lucywillis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=22&Itemid=47

For the coming section the following might be of interest too.

Paul Nash, John Sargent, John Piper, Eric Ravillious. Just have a look at these and make a note if anything jumps out at you.

Pointers for the next assignment. You are working well Patricia.

Be a little more experimental with the paint, try wet in wet and see how you get on with this.
Be braver with depth of colour when needed.
Practise your washes.
Increase your sketching
Visit some galleries before the next assignment (I know you did during Part One of the course)

Tutor report: Assignment 1

Overall Comments

Hello Patricia, thank you for submitting your work for Assignment 1. You have made a very good start to the course and have submitted 5 folders, one for each project in part 1 and a sketchbook. You use good quality watercolour paper for all exercises and your work is clearly labelled and well presented.

Feedback on assignment Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity

Project 1. Mixing and applying watercolour.

It’s essential to develop as wide a repertoire as possible of marks and awareness of the boundaries of what you can achieve with different brushes and materials. You have experimented well with loading your brush, varying the depth of tone and creating a range of marks. Well done. You have created a very competent shoal of fish and the leaves sketch has leaves of varying tone. You have completed the exercise where you are required to wash off the leaves competently. I think the final layer of leaves could have benefited from having a little more pigment in order to create more depth between the layers.

Project 2. Laying washes.

These exercises represent some of the basic building blocks of watercolour painting and take practice to achieve well. Your first flat wash is very even, well done. Your tonally graded washes don’t have enough gradation in them though the second attempt is better. It is perhaps easier to achieve this with a dark colour. Start with a very intense dark blue and practice getting it completely clear by the bottom of the page.

The mixed wash requires two colours of paint, and by combining them in the middle you achieve a third colour. I think you need to practice these a little more Patricia. This is starting to work but what you achieve at the bottom of the painting should be around the centre, and the cross over between the phtalo blue in the the middle section needs to be smoother, no obvious lines. It is definitely improving in your second attempt and you will have the opportunity to keep practicing this the more you paint.

Project 3. Resist techniques.

You have experimented very thoroughly with the wax and oil pastel resist Patricia, well done. The experimentation with the masking fluid has worked well too and has produced interesting images. I still think you can afford to use stronger colours for your washes. Try to get more pigment in your initial wash rather than over layering at this stage. It’s good practice to learn to control the paint in an individual layer before moving onto overlaying several washes. It might be worth you buying 2 or 3 artist quality pans of watercolour, if you are currently using student quality paints, just so that you can see the difference in the quality of the paint. The pigment is much richer in artist quality paints.

Your research with the madras cloth is complex and a worthwhile exercise. It looks like you have learnt a lot from trying out the gum Arabic and the gouache in this way too. You are starting to get some very nice qualities. Your experimenting is starting to pay off. Well done.

Project 4. Making marks in different ways.

Again you have worked thoroughly here Patricia and have closely followed the instructions, well done. You have initially tried a variety of brushes on two different types of paper. I agree with you that the second blue attempt on the textured paper is more interesting and can understand why you find it distracting to think about specific clouds when trying out different brush strokes. You are beginning to capture definite movement and energy in your tree paintings. The third set of paintings might have benefited from more white space between marks or, again, more variation in the depth of colour in order to clearly see the variety of mark making. In fact you note this yourself in your blog and you also identify that you might benefit from some artist’s quality paints. Your notes on layers of paint application with the final tree painting are observant regarding letting the paint dry between applications. Your seascape in blue tones uses lifting off very well and has successfully captured an essence of the cloud formations.

Using a variety of brushes and tools.

You have tried three different brushes, lifting off and have gone onto try different tools. (If you do more than one painting on a day and don’t have a title, remember to date and number it so that I can refer to it).

I think you could have pushed yourself a little more in this section, particularly the surfaces and textures but you will have opportunities to do this throughout the course. Keep your mind open to the use of alternative brushes and tools as you progress with the course and remember to experiment regularly to develop you marks to use in your vocabulary of watercolour techniques.

Research Point.

You have done extensive research for this section, looking at artists including watercolour painters and a variety of styles of painting. You have given your own thoughts on the artists’ work and on one occasion you have recreated the work in pencil crayon. This is a very worthwhile exercise and is also worth doing in watercolour. In this way you can explore the techniques that artists use to create works that you admire and may wish to incorporate in to your own painting style and vocabulary. To push your research further you need to explore further how the works link into your own painting and progress.

Assignment 1.

You have sent several samples of preparation work with your final piece. In this prep work you consider three different compositions, different media and different styles. I think you would have benefited from doing close up work in the pencil sketches before moving on to the watercolour work. This would help you to make sure that you really look at what you are trying to capture and to make a clear attempt at the tonal qualities and the shadow on the cloth. I think you can afford to explore the use of the pencil, and perhaps darker pencils. The range of blacks and greys you can get from a 6B pencil for example are extensive. Try to be a little more expressive in your lines too, try working quite quickly in some of your sketchbook work and see what you capture. We are looking for self-expression and emotion as well as accurate renditions of objects. You will benefit across all areas of creative work from developing your drawing skills and I can see you have a competent drawing style already for recording basic shapes and positioning. You can afford to work bigger too and to be much braver and bolder in your drawing and mark making. ( I have just seen your other drawing prep work on the blog, I think it is a good idea to send all the prep work you have done for an assignment).

Your close up water colour work of the lemons and the pomegranates could also be pushed further too and you already have some very nice brush strokes and accidental qualities in the experimentation work with the close up fruit. In the pomegranates top left you are beginning to show some of the intensity of colour that is possible with watercolour. The yellow wash also works well on the top right piece. I think you could have experimented with more intense colour in the background too and again the shadows and tonal qualities could have been explored further at this stage.

Here is a study of dragon fruits by Elizabeth Blackadder. It is from this link where the image is at a better resolution. http://pinkpagodastudio.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/dame-elizabeth-blackadder.html

You can see how she captures delicacy and intensity of colour through the medium of watercolour. A way of working towards this is to do several versions of the painting. As soon as it starts to become overworked, start again. As you progress you begin to work out what it is essential to include and what is superfluous, but it does take quite a few versions when you are just starting out.

The colour study. I think this is quite successful. The actual fruits lack a little detail, but you have captured tonal qualities, and have tried an interesting wash on the background which I think works well with the pomegranate. You are right to think that the tablecloth would have worked better without the black lines. They at least need to get thinner and paler as they go towards the back. The shadows need more careful observation. I am pleased you are trying to incorporate what you have learnt from looking at Nolde’s work into your own painting here and have experimented with a new approach. This is also similar to Gaugin’s approach.

Your final painting, has some nice qualities but does not have the tonal boldness that your prep works have, It is more contolled than the prep work and loses it’s energy because of this, the loss of water marks particularly in the table cloth and background miss out on using the medium and it’s unique qualities. The composition would also have benefited from stronger directional light to pull out the tonal qualities and the shadows. The positioning of the fruit makes it look a little lost on the page. Look back at Nolde’s work again, for example, and consider how he frames his subject.

Sketchbooks Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity

Thanks for including your sketchbook. Your sketch book work will need to be much more comprehensive in future parts of the course.

I recommend you also

Develop your drawing skills with daily practice
Extend the use of your sketchbook by working in a variety of media and doing original first hand observational drawings and sketches. These often become research work for eventual paintings.
Use your sketchbook for comprehensive working out of visual ideas prior to any painting.
Keep a variety of sizes of sketchbook including a small pocket sketchbook which you keep with you at all times.

Here is an example of how to use a sketchbook to research your ideas through drawing.

http://www.weareoca.com/fine_art/inside-sketchbooks-as-a-form-of-enquiry/

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays Context

Thank you for sending your blog link. It is logically presented. It relates well to your exercises and shows evidence of self-reflection.

In terms of reflection, here is an article that looks briefly at different depths of reflection,

http://www.weareoca.com/education/learning-logs/

I would say your reflection is similar to point no. 3 on the whole. To push this further, to no.4, you need to think about and note how you are going to develop your own work and how the work is influenced by other artists’ work. ( You have just started to do this in assignment one). Where does your work sit in relation to the world of art that has already happened or is happening right now. That is something to think about over the coming months of the course as you begin to work on developing your own unique voice.

Suggested reading/viewing Context

After looking through the artists that you have researched on your blog another artist that comes to mind is Elizabeth Blackadder. You can see some examples of her work here on the OCA Student media resources page. Use the password and user name to login to the site as given on the Bridgeman link page. Here are two examples. The site has several.

http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/ImageView.aspx?result=12&balid=370113

http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/ImageView.aspx?result=5&balid=50704

Still worth a look for the composition of the image though. Another artist to look at is Hutchins-Puechavy. Here is an example of her lily paintings.

http://www.bridgemaneducation.com/ImageView.aspx?result=31&balid=248157

As the research point on page 44 suggests I think it is good at this stage for you to look at a variety of artists, as you are doing, and make notes about what you do and don’t like in their work. If you look at the library images provided online via the oca webpage – there are hundreds of watercolours to look at. You are also visiting galleries to look at work first hand which is essential.

Karen Armitage and Elizabeth Blackadder and Claudia Hutchens-Puechavy, as I have mentioned above, are all worth a look at as 20^th century watercolour painters.

Excellent that you have seen work first hand in the gallery and have benefited from this. Try to keep this up.

Pointers for the next assignment

Do lots of drawing practice as well as painting
Don’t feel you can only do each exercise once, do it until you are happy with it, try lots of versions if you need to.
Try to use a wider range of intensity of colour in your water colour paint. Don’t be frightened of using intense colours. This can work very well wet on wet too. Consider using artist’s quality paints. The tube paints you have bought may be artist;s quality , you don’t specify?
Continue to do the research work as outlined in the course booklet, as you have, plus your own research work as necessary for the development of your ideas and include this research in your log book.
Remember to show how your research feeds in to you rown ideas and experimentation.

I hope you will find this feedback useful Patricia as you move onto part 2 of the course. Any questions regarding the feedback here or your progress in Part 2 email me.

Tutor name:	Lisa O’Brien
Date	12/11/12
Next assignment due	To be agreed – Patricia is taking a short break to complete a Masters.