Category Archives: NON OCA WORK

Practice of painting Judging your art and maintaining development

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reference

suggestions by OCA based on the Virtue video@

  • Find works or art whose material qualities you admire, test your own work against it, and write about how you get on. Remember that you needn’t ‘like’ or ‘admire’ the artist (though Virtue clearly does), just recognize that there’s something you can draw on. Be hard on yourself and keep trying.
  • Use drawing as a tool to figure out how things in the world interlock. Then interlock those drawings to make something new. Scale that up (remember the grid exercise?) and work on that. Remember that a detailed little drawing scaled up spreads the information over a larger field. This is where gesture and material play a part in creating interest.
  • Be simultaneously rigorous and promiscuous. Restricting a part of your technique will give you the chance to test other areas without getting confused. If everything’s changing all the time, then there’s no yardstick.
  • Working large isn’t easy for lots of reasons (many simply spatial), but the gestures it allows an artist to make are physically different. Try it and you’ll start using your shoulder and trunk. It’s suddenly a very physical and tiring activity. Not being able to see the whole thing on one go is strange at first, too.
  • When you get the chance to show work, think about how it might, or might not, be framed or mounted. How might it be attached to the wall? What colour should that wall be? How high up? Even if you just fantasize about these elements (and drawing sketches of galleries with your work in is fun, too), you will start to see your work differently. Try it