https://www.leeds-art.ac.uk/about-us/staff/staff/duncan-mosley/
Duncan Mosley is a Fine Art Tutor at Leeds Arts University. I reached out to him to better understand the painting module as part of the Fine Art course, and to ask questions in regards to making canvases, displaying canvases, where to take my practice as someone interested in Abstract Expressionism, and any hints and tips for my portfolio.
Here are the notes from our meeting:
In painting we talk of the 'phenomenal surface' – textured, rough, glows in colours, in agency, means things culturally spiritually, in gender. Theoretical lines of enquiry. Around beauty, aesthetics and politics. Everything has got an aesthetic. A lens of beauty. Contested discourses of history.
Uncertainty. A word used a lot this year but also prior to the pandemic. Think of what I’m certain about. Am I certain about the medium I use? But if I’m uncertain, what am I uncertain about? Small paintings, large paintings.
More certain about. 3 box diagram. Most uncertain about and the thing I need to figure out. Audit of my own work. What those uncertainties are and that opens up new possibilities and what my new work can be about. Marry that with the certainties. That is the first session every year. Making work in new ways.
Painting and the digital. Painting in the digital age. Reproduction and distrubtion. Alter certain aspects of images. Notion of time. My paintings have no sense of time When looked at altogether. It's only through my mark making that we can see that I've made something quickly, through layers. How we interact with time is disrupted. Painting is a very different record of time. Marks of paint. Once you look at abstraction, look at marks to see calibrations of time. The canvas as a timer. Contemporary painters are dealing with this. What does paint offer us when we are offered with so many possibilities of image-making?
Colour as subject.
Symbolic. Cultural. Connottion. Gender. Binary. Complementary. Red and green, blue and orange, yellow and purple. Figuration.
Picasso and blue period. Palette of blue. Effect of sadness and melancholy. What he’s doing. People often overlook his rose period. Beginning of something else. Colour is used as something else. Primary vehicle for expression.
Performance. Walk around. Canvas on floor. Work quickly. Dance with brush. Aggressively. What are you performing? Person depicted in a painting. Image is historically meaning something different to a selfie. Cruder set of values than painting as an act than something different to a photograph. To a drawing. The making of a painting. The way you make. What you make your body do. Pollock in difference to Hockney or Vasquith. Or Basquiat.
Idea and what you are doing.
Mapping your territory. Practice inventory. Themes. Mediums. Oils, inks, acrylics. Processes. Tools. Brushes. Palette knives. Applicators. Form. Intended form of the work. Small paintings. Large scale. Experimental looking, Multiples.
Identify what you have and what you need. Self-reflecting. What artists they are referencing. Push it further.
Fluid marks, flat marks, textured marks, are they using the right marks? The ideas become more activated and engaging wth the slight shift of mark-making.
Value. The value of material, processes, techniques. If you work quickly and swifly, different value and principles than if you use oil painting where it takes longer to dry between layers. Watercolour is maybe more domesticated. Medium of the "Sunday painter". Contemporary artists use it all to their advantage. Paper or cardboard. Framed art has different value. Found materials. Printed work has different value to an original painted canvas.
Wade Guyton. Digital Print making up a printed canvas. Misuses it. Challenges historical markers of paintings. Social political, values. Everything can be unpicked against those values.
Value of presentation. Can change the value how they are transmitted and broadcasted. Low brow and high brow. Roy Lichtenstein. Little frame from a cheap comic, painted the comic and put it within the art gallery. Changes within the image. Within a new set of values.
Primary market where you encounter what’s going on right now.
12 exhibitions a year, maybe more, have an opportunity, sign up to a newsletter. Everything going on. Maybe set up a different email address “junk” mail sent to them.
- Assembly House
- East Street
- Munroe Place/House
Boris Groys writes extensively about tech and art. Good book to theorise about.
Abstraction
Curation
Collection
Figuration
How to write and think about art.
Boredom – produces the space that we can make art. Art gallery. Modernity. Industrial revolution. Everything is connected.
Look at the wider contemporary and social.
Andy Warhol. Poor background. Went to New York. Not known. He became the most successful illustrator in New York City. He'd done everthing he could do. He was earning over 100,000 dollars for his work which was monumental at the time. Lived in a 4 story townhouse. He wanted to be a famous artist but didn't know howto doit. When he did know how to do it he brought so much into art. We could never look at a Coca Cola bottle or Campbell's soup can the same again.
David Steens. MA Fine Art. Discuss with him if I'd perhaps like to take on an MA in the future.
How to display a canvas. Screw canvses to the wall. Could be on the art tech blog that was e-mailed to me. Email Joanne. I also have the freedom to install my work in the uni to photograph for my portfolio and my instagram so that people have the opportunity to see my work in a setting and get an idea of photography lighting, size.
In regards to my portfolio of work there is no doubt about my level of skill even if I have only started painting in August 2020. Consider making the same painting again - reducing marks, using different brushes or handmade vessels, more canvas coming through to experiment and push further.
Read More:
Important publications and links that may differ from Illustration sources:
- Turps Banana
- Aesthetica Magazine
- Hi Fructose
- Flash Art
- Art Forum
- Emergent Mag
- lar-magazine.com
- thisistomorrow.info
- painters-table.com
- Blouin Modern Painters
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