Exhibitions

I've been to two exhibitions recently which I really enjoyed. The first was at the Dean Gallery and celebrated the centenary of the birth of Sir Basil Spence.
I loved the images and the models. Ironically the exhibition itself was badly layed out in that the audio visuals were noisy and distracting - often three or more different screens in one room which made you feel like you were walking into a wall of noise. Whether this was intentional or not, it made me irritable, uncomfortable and distracted from the wonderful images I was looking at. I particularly loved his posters, especially the design for the Southern Motors Garage, which is garage close to where I live. The exhibition is part of a project to document Spence's life and his work can also be seen here. Until I do an official family tree investigation, I also like to think we are related!

The other exhibition was Victoria Crowe, "Plant Memory" at the RSA. I love her work and have for ages. I have a complete folder on my pc of any image which has appeared online and her work crops up in my researched images again and again. The exhibition was relatively small but the images were wonderful. I was particularly interested in the way she achieves blocks and layers of wash and textures as this is a direction I have been trying to get my work to go. Looking at her images face to face, gave me a much clearer idea of how this can be achieved.

I've been a little lazy in keeping this blog updated with regards to last week's classes. They were both good and I managed to resolve one of the things I was working on. The images here show a progression of experimenting with the things I was stuggling with last week. I am trying to both merge nature and man made structures but also reverse colour. So that nature is stripped of it's colour and becomes monochromatic and the man made structure has colour.

The final one I did was in some ways the most successful - it took the least time and perhaps that was a good thing because it meant I didn't "think", I just reacted to what I was doing and that made it a much more natural response. I think I have a lot more to do on this before I run out of steam on it but I am allowing the work to take me, rather than trying to push things too quickly. The next development is likely to explore the ideas of colour a little more and perhaps movement. I have some interesting images I took in the Lake District which combine landscape, structure and speed - they were taken from a moving car.

I'll try to work on this more next week.