Sheep after inspiration by Gamnqoa Kukama

The latest assignment was tied in with the theme of the art of Africa. I chose for specialisation the country Botswana, not the least because of their twenty thousand or more year of art history. The largest of these sites in Botswana is Tsodilo, but, I finally chose for inspiration for my painting the art of Gamnqoa Kukama. He has said a wonderful thing:
“Art is a spiritual thing. You long for it when you are without it. It is pulling you to do it. You cannot leave it.”

And also, his art has something in it that draws my eye. It may be his background, which you ought to read up on. It is really quite interesting.


This, then, was painted in acrylics, after the same inspiration as mr Kukama uses - from my childhood, the animals I knew, the plants I saw. I tried to draw upon his style of art when painting it, disregarding perspective in favour of feeling, using the idea of grass tufts rather than the photographic view of them and so on. I tried to keep a somewhat limited colour palette, with Process Cyan, Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, Process Black and a tiny wee bit of Permanen Green Middle.

Two pieces of "modern art"

To me, a lot of what is labelled modern art is utterly without interest. I am annoyed by tagging and graffiti that serves no purpose but to seemingly try to make the world acknowledge that "I am here, hey, look at me!", abstract art sometimes makes me feel nauseous and I am seldom to never caught by pop-art, op-art and so on and so forth. The assignment, thus, to make two paintings in whatever two styles of modern art that I chose myself, was initially a source of some frustration. But creativity kicked in, and the results were fairly satisfactory. Not much more, but still. My nickname being Ellie, and me sometimes nodding in appreciation at the very best street artists and graffiti pictures (there are a few, I could probably count them on one hand), I thought I'd do something so artsy as to bring "ugly" art, street art, rebellion art, to the respected canvas. Therefore I spent an afternoon putting this idea into practice, and the result can be seen here. I tried my best to think of some of the features of a graffitied name - how do they use colours, what makes the name stand out yet being readable, and so on and so forth.I used Process Yellow, Process Cyan and Windsor Blue. Apart from this, only Titanium White and Process Black were used. The black was spiked with some Crimson, to make it stand out even more, and I added it very conscious of the effect it would have on the painting. The highlights were a tricky part, but the last spots of yellow a thing of improvisation that turned out well. So, it is not as garish and eye-catching as most graffiti, but rather, done the way I would do it. I am fairly happy with it.

The next picture is a digital photo manipulation. Because there is so much digital art these days, and, much of it really is true art in my opinion, I wanted to try and see, could I perhaps do something of the kind? Having no illusions of my skills with Photoshop, I began with a picture of me in costume from a larp - as Dream of the Fair Folk. There used to be a tree trunk in the background, which was when I learned to love the Clone tool (which clones one area onto another).I added the light magic effect thing, and then I used filters to make it look less like a photograph. It was a bit more work than that, but, that was the main process. It taught me a lot about photo manipulation, and some about what a vast array of tools are available for digital artists; also, some of what is required for expertise in the area. Regardless, I am fairly happy with the result, and it was well received by the teacher.

Learning by mistake

The first assignment of the autumn semester was to paint a portrait of oneself from one's childhood, and a memory. For various reasons I had no reference material available, and so had to revert to memory and vagueness. I started out painting on a canvas of fairly small size, but painted for too long in the evening - the light changed, I made a colour-mix and then, the morning after, saw my mistake. Covering it up only made everything worse and so, I faced an uncommon occurence to me: I had to start over from the very beginning.
So I did. With deadline mere hours away (I believe, eight or six hours, maybe less) On a rather larger canvas of size F4, I suspect, I worked with the original idea, but simplified it. There is me, reading a book - as I did all the time, whether I was standing, sitting or even walking - but it is all made with a muted, Raw Umber mixed with Titanium White, colour, and sketchy at that. I did fill it in with a bit of colour, but only a little. The book is a little more detailed, but the interesting part are the surroundings. As I seemed to live most of the time inside my own head, or in my books, and the books and my fantasies were all much more colourful and enticing than real life, I painted some fantastical and mythical beings and things around the head of the girl. A lady with a sword, a dragon, some fairy lights or possibly butterflies, a moon, a stylised star. My art teacher labelled it "Symbolist" though I hesitate to place myself amongst the distinguished painters of the age when that label first appeared.

I certainly am not calling this a good painting, in any way but the idea that started it. It is hastily made, the colours aren't very well matched, the composition of it is decent but not perfect and over all, yes, it certainly shows that the artist, that is, me, was working under the pressure of a severe time limit. I simply didn't have the time to even lay the groundwork for making it better at a later time. I had to have a painting ready and so that was the only goal.
No, it's not a very good painting, but it was a learning experience nevertheless and the subject is one I plan on re-using at a later date.