I am back! I have lots to tell you about. But let’s tackle one topic at a time.
Nobody can say that 2020 was a good year. Battling a pandemic wasn’t in anyone’s plans. I certainly hadn’t factored a pandemic into my MA study timetable!
But for me there were a lot of positives to being in lockdown. A big positive was being furloughed from March to the end of June. This gave me time to paint. Most of all it gave me time to experiment and I made a few breakthroughs with my work.
I began experimenting with different mediums which included marker pens and coloured pencils. I also tried Pop Art for the first time. I began with an homage to Andy Warhol and those famous Marilyn screenprints.
I looked at cropped images which enabled me to concentrate less on the details and focus more on the composition.
I discovered that coloured pencils lent themselves well to the pop art style and, that I could create interesting textures with them.
As often happens with my work, pieces I consider unfinished, create interesting dynamics within my work, and sometimes I need to learn when to stop working and let those dynamics speak for themselves.
As with the piece above, by leaving the work unfinished, the bra became more than just a bra in an unusual environment and actually became part of the landscape itself. Leaving the work much more open to interpretation. It also solved that age old problem of when you get to a certain point when everything is going too well and you don’t want to spoil it!
Being in lockdown gave me the time to enjoy experimenting. Working with cropped images and aquamarkers proved really affective for these pop art pieces. I really enjoyed working with coloured pencil and decided to combine them with acrylic paint for the work for my first MA exhibition. But that is for another post.
Tracy J Hughes Art 