25 October 2014

Contemporary art sketchbook walk - week 4

The theme was collage, so we prepared some pages in our sketchbooks by gluing in coloured tissue paper, if we hadn't done so already... for trying various media on. Another suggestion was cutting through pages, which after seeing how well this worked in the Large Sketchbook course, I was tempted to do ... but haven't got round to it yet...
Collage session in Hoxton Square
Work by John Stark (at Charlie Smith) was rather lurid and dare I say schoolboyish. At least it gave me a chance to use pastels on top of inked paper -
After that, the paintings by Nogah Engler (at Mummery & Schnelle) were a delight to the eye - many layered ... but with a grim story of genocide behind it.
 In the same show, photographs by Ori Gersht (he of the exploding flowers), which gave me another chance to get out the pastels -
On to Flowers East, where Patrick Hughes was showing lots of his 3D paintings - as you walk past them, the perspective changes drastically, due to the construction of the "canvas"  and the use of shadows -
In a back room were a few pieces by Tom Hammick, using collage of Japanese printed papers as well as painting or linocut reduction -
 Coffee time - to The Bridge -
 with wonderful machines on the bar
 and a Russian tea-room feel upstairs -
 Then Lucinda took us to her studio [with views of industrial Hoxton...]. Her earlier work, semi-abstract houses "of personality" -
 has changed to semi-abstract mountainous landscapes, informed by walking in the Pyrenees -
 and is strangely related to the "mountains" of the London skyline -
At home I worked on the day's pages ... away from the subject, they could "become themselves" -
"After John Stark"
"After Ori Gersht"
Ready for a nice fat pen, next time

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