Posts Tagged ‘Painting’
recent paintings
I have spent the last six months painting obsessively and I have come to the end of my 72 canvas stash! Feeling both excited and sad that this part of the journey is over. I had no idea how these paintings would develop when I started them. Here are some of the ones I finished recently. They are oil on canvas and range in size from 20 x 20cms, 25 x 25cms and 30 x 30cms.
This is the most continuous and uninterrupted period time I have spent developing paintings, working nearly everyday in my studio for 6 months on them. For financial reasons, usually when I make such a large body of work I use recycled and found materials, such as my rubble installation, the bank statement boat installation or the floating ink works made with buoys. It has been really great to focus this much on painting on canvas. I even started making my own paint.
I draw all the time but I never do studies for the paintings beforehand, I prefer to work things out directly on the canvas, enjoying the element of chance and surprise. I improvise, working spontaneously hoping to make constant discoveries, no matter how small. One or two of them I might go back to and work on, but time will tell how they feel after a little bit of distance. I am working on 10 Chinese paper scrolls at the moment, its nice to stretch out a bit, they are 8 foot long but working with ink is a lot less forgiving and every mark I make stays visible forever.
After a few weeks of painting, some of the paintings started to gain a feel of moment so I continued along this journey. Thinking about Taoism and Eastern philosophy. I decided to call them after different types of bamboo, bamboo being highly regarded for its many virtues, and a symbol for harmony between nature and human beings.
Holttumochloa magica
Ochlandra travancorica
Phyllostachys arcana
Himalayacalamus hookerianus
Images above 1,2,3,4 oil on canvas 25 x 25cms (top 3 images ) & 30 x 30 cms (bottom image) Marianne Slevin 2019
Currently these are all available for private viewing at the Funny Little Gallery, Doolin
Enjoy it!
Work in Progress oil on canvas Marianne Slevin
There has been a lot of Alan Watts recorded chatter going on around here lately. Alan Watts was a very entertaining philosopher. The book is called “Your it!” James gave it to me for my Birthday, he also gave me “Empowering Women” by Louise L. Hay, I have been really enjoying both of them. What really struck me from the very beginning of both books was that the authors said “I am not a healer” Louise L. Hay and “I am not a guru” Alan Watts, it is all about you. I like this attitude. What I also realized was that I want to be “digging the now” as Alan Watts puts it, when it comes to making art and doing it because I am really enjoying doing it, not to try to be good or make work to impress people. This my seem obvious but when I heard it, it made me rethink. There is so much pressure on artist trying to look and sound coherent particularly for commercial galleries that much of the enjoyment of making art is lost. Artists whose work was once exciting and unselfconscious becomes dull, tripping over itself. What is the point unless you are enjoying it! I know I enjoy making art but somehow I never fully realized just how important that was before. I wanted to make good work before, now I don’t care who thinks it is good or not I am just doing it because I enjoy it. I feel like I have defiantly lost a couple of wrinkles!
This sounds really simple but what happens then is that what you enjoy doing one moment changes and you become bored and have to keep finding the new things to keep you surprised and entertained. Each different painting will have many different stages of enjoyment in it. With the piece that I have been working on for the past two months on and off, more off than on! I painted until I ran out of excitement and then I stopped, I looked at it many times to see if I know what to do with it, not until yesterday was I able to and today I really enjoyed bringing something else to it that I didn’t have before. It is constantly moving and shifting like everything else. There are challenging times when you are not enjoying it and you are wondering how to! For me every painting is unique and you have to kind of trick yourself to get out of your own way and let it happen. The allure of paintings for me is not in the obvious or the details but the magical symphony that happens when you soften your gaze and disengage your rational brain for a while!
Organised Chaos
Work in progress, “Organised Chaos”, mixed media by Marianne Slevin 2010
This is a photograph of a painting that I was just working on. I started it about a month ago and left it, not really knowing where to go next with it. I started it using pencil and pigment on cardboard. There was a drawing of branchlike lines and root-like lines beneath, our children had drawn something on it (they were allowed!) Then it was painted around the drawing with pigment.
I had been thinking about my art and how maybe I could combine many of the different aspects of the ways I work in one piece, such as working on the idea of mycelium but ion a freer way that my be more dreamlike and open to include other interests and intuitions. Content and focus can be great but sometimes you got to let go a bit and be more spontaneous and in the moment. I suddenly realized that I was like a painting I started about 14 years ago, but taking it to new places. It was like revisiting a moment in time, but with a different perspective. Now looking around the studio it does kind of knit much of the work together, like a missing link, maybe.
I have started reading about the chaos theory, it is early days yet to say how much or little it relates to my work, but so far it is fascinating and I am also fascinated with quantum physics, particularly an experiment where they discovered atoms behave differently when they are being observed. The one experiment I found is called Dr. Quantum Double split experiment. This really leads me to all sorts of wonderings! So what we see is actually changed by us seeing it. Are paintings and other Visual Art changed by those who view it? This is a theory James suggested being a possible reason for certain art works becoming exceptionally famous compared with other works of a similar quality. We noticed that when people came into the gallery a really liked a certain painting, often the next few visitors would also comment on that painting, had the previous viewers actually changed and energized the atoms in the painting by viewing it? And if viewing a piece of art with a positive feeling adds to it and if viewing it with a negative feeling takes from it? Maybe we will do this experiment one day, as James suggested. Has anyone any thoughts or experiences on this, I would really like to learn more about it, so please feel free to voice them.
Jellyfish Paintings
“Jellyfish 1”, oil on canvas by Marianne Slevin 2010
“Jellyfish 1 and 2”, oil on canvas by Marianne Slevin, 2010
These are two paintings I am currently working on, whether they are finished or not, I am not sure yet. I started the dark one a few days ago and the light one only yesterday. I like the contrast; they are like opposites but of the same thing. These were inspired by watching a David Attenbrough nature documentary, called “creatures of the deep”. I was blown away by the haunting images of the jellyfish. A billion years before there was life on the earth, life began in the sea. Jellyfish have no brains and no blood, I find them fascinating and really lovely to paint! As my painting is a lot about the process I am using the jellyfish as a starting point but allowing the paint and marks to have their own journey too. Building up layers of transparent glazes and opaque flatter areas, so it becomes deeper and quite dreamlike.
The secret gallery's blog 