A riot of colour

I've been working on a painting for the past week for an exhibition called When we build let us think that we build forever which marks the 125th anniversary of the magnificent Margaret Street building at BIAD. So far, I've had a love/hate relationship with my canvas; today we are not on speaking terms and definately not friends.

↑ Uurgh!!

I haven't painted in the conventional sense for at least three years and even then, when I was doing my MA full time and had a studio space, I was working on a massive scale and transcending normative structures of painting such as the canvas frame and the surface of the painting to create large-scale paintings and hybrid paintsculptstallations. It's no surprise then, that this piece has been a bit of a struggle. I've focused a lot on the idea of writing and text as well in my work more recently as my PhD explores the interrelation of the two, and so going back to 'painting' in a purer sense feels like I've gone backwards and has been quite hard.

I've set up a  project called Word Drafting and have also been creating 'book-paintings' which I feel a lot more comfortable with. The Word Drafting project is managed as a private blog and I've been using the book below for part of this project, which I guess is a natural progression of my 'book-paintings' that I showed at the University of Wolverhampton previously.

The book is currently on its way to Canada where the participants there can contribute to it how they want to, for example writing, poetry, textiles or photography and then send it on to the other members. I like the feel of painting in the books and there always seems to be less pressure than painting on a canvas.

I'm thinking of adding some text to the canvas I started and maybe being a bit more experimental in the colours and the mark-makings. I quite like how the colours work with each other but there seems to be no tension or compositional qualities. I've had all sorts of flashbacks of questions people ask me about my work ... what is your work about? what do you paint? what is it? ... all horrible questions that keep popping up in the back of my mind when I've been trying to work on the bugger! Aaaargh! Hopefully I'll post some images of the beast when we're friends again ... or at least speaking to each other anyway.