Bums on Seats Part IV

This week is all about colour. Yes I know, colour theory has been done to death but I feel that it’s important to consider it- especially following my recent works “First Past the Post” and “Straight from the Horse’s Ass”. I would also say that because I haven’t worked on a painting for a while (in the traditional sense) it serves as a reminder to not make any schoolboy errors. Experimentation is all well and good but the wrong choices will confuse everything. Or will they?

Up to this point the work has been mainly talking about the progression of time and the obsessive nature of your own online presence. So how do these abstract concepts relate to a colour scheme?

In truth it’s all down to interpretation; would I consider a month with crap viewing figures as being a cold colour? Or alternatively, would a green or a blue indicate a calmer feeling of, “oh well last month went alright so I don’t need to worry about it...”? On the flip side, warmer colours mean something different but essentially carry the same set of  contradictions. It’s a bugger alright.

Christ, don’t trip over your laces on the starting line, it’s only colour, they’ll fade over time anyway- which does in fact lead me into the next point. I mentioned the passage of time earlier and this work (which will account for a year’s worth of analytics) represents how something as trivial as a statistic is all consuming but is then quickly overtaken by the latest data set. In the gallery below are some of the tests that I have been doing, beginning on canvas. In the later versions, even though the simple progression around the colour wheel can be digitally altered to any preference, it’s interesting how complimentary colours cancel each other out even in a computerised simulation.      

The acrylic tests include some experiments with opacity using a gloss medium as a thinner. I would say that I’m unsure about which is the best ratio but in any case it felt like I was painting with dead expensive shampoo or conditioner- not ideal! However, translucency is something I should explore further as it gives the image more depth and would make a change from the block colours of the previous works.

Next week: preparing canvas ……..YAWN…… but seeing as I’m writing about everything…

Masking failure?

I gave up on this piece about two years ago. For reasons that I can’t remember, the initial promise over these two images soon disappeared. After recently going though the archive of older work, I came across it again and then thought of an experiment. The original intention of images can so often be mistaken these days, constant recycling and the porous online world allows for essageration to appear on a daily basis. Another thing was that I have always been told to avoid describing your work at all costs, but the current trend is to do just that, using thirty hashtags or less most of the time. What if I were to utilise these common practices with something that (in reality) failed, then see how it compared with a legitimate piece of work...?

Would a higher number of tags, likes, new followers, comments etc, with relation to this image, subvert the purpose of a work or what is actually means.

I posted this failed image about a week ago and explained the experiment. Usual posts after this amount time reach around thirty likes and result in five or six new followers. This one after a week ‘outperformed’ most of my actual work by about twenty percent across all categories…

Is this purely down to publicity? Timing?? Probably, but it makes you think about the perception of any given image, even if it’s rubbish in the first place