Assignment 4 – Reflection on Formative Feedback

My feedback for this part was via Google Hangout online.

Feedback on Assignment

I had struggled to make a decision on composition for the assignment painting and so had developed three to choose between. My tutor pointed out that my painting is sometimes more successful when I am more intuitive and that I have a tendency to overwork a painting. I totally agree with this, There are elements of all three preparatory paintings that I prefer to the final piece.

Sketchbooks

My tutor pulled up a photograph I had taken comparing the soft and hard landscape exercises. She suggested that this shows the development of my original and emerging approaches. She is absolutely correct in recognising that I do want to experiment more with abstraction and indeed have been enjoying the early exercises in part 5 which tackle this idea. I made the comment to her that perhaps I would have been helped a little more if the abstract art section had come a little earlier in the course.

I totally agree about the colours of the Cemetery Road picture. The colour is definitely an ‘in between’ colour. I have to be totally honest here and confess to randomly picking a colour that contrasted with the blue giving no thought to the actual intensity of the hue.

At this point she also pointed out that pretty much all my paintings (and indeed my drawings in Drawing Skills 1) run from bottom left up. She thought I may be left-handed although I am not. I don’t really know why I create paintings like this; it is instinctive, the perspective just sits happiest with me. We also discussed that I occasionally put a barrier across a composition like the poles in the Venice painting. This is again something I can work with compositionally moving forward.

Learning Blog & Critical thinking

I am aware that I treat my blog like a diary. I usually write notes into google docs about what I am doing as I go along, then edit at a later date in Word before pasting the text to my blog. This means that I can have a tendency to document what I am actually doing. My tutor has suggested that often I take photos as I go along and these photos in themselves document the process. I need to start writing more about my aims and intentions, what I am seeking to show and why, what is not working and again why that might be the case. Rather than simply making a decision I need to discuss why I am doing it.

The areas for development my tutor has highlighted are to be more confident with my ability with regard to playing with the paint in a more abstract way; smudging, knife etc. I have already begun to explore this more in Part 5.

I can do more thinking around colour – sensitivity and subtlety. I totally agree with this, I am not a colourist, colour has never been my strong point and I want to make a series of much more muted and subtle paintings for my Part 5 Assignment which I hope will demonstrate an improvement in this area.

I need to start linking the research more with my process, exploring how research changes my material decision making and methods.

Finally she suggests exploring more the compositional pathways and hurdles in my work.

I have made a note of the suggested Painters in my blog to investigate.