Overall Comments

Electronic submission, student lives in USA

• An impressive submission of work in which you have not been afraid to challenge yourself

• Good engagement with tasks and a readiness to engage in technical exploration of materials very evident

• Purposeful, focussed play will be helpful to future development

• Blog is very thorough. Use your artist research to pursue an increasing understanding of your own visual motivations.

Assessment potential

I understand your aim is to go for the Painting Degree and that you plan to submit your work for assessment at the end of this course. From the work you have shown in this assignment, providing you commit yourself to the course, I believe you have the potential to succeed at assessment. In order to meet all the assessment criteria, there are certain areas you will need to focus on, which I will outline in my feedback.  

Feedback on assignment

Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity

Project 5 Linocut mark making

You have begun to build a useful vocabulary of marks and an understanding of your tools. No exploration of black on white at this stage.

Project 6 Single colour linocut

Corner of room interior view: A lovely and challenging choice of subject-matter that has enabled you to produce a print of exciting black and white contrast and pattern. An impressive early effort, well done.

Still life: Another good composition. The simple colour scheme works well and the carrying of the colour into the upper part of the print has allowed you to unify the image. The sub-group of pencils and eraser all sitting neatly together is a delight.

Project 7 Multi-block linoprint

Again your challenged yourself with complex subject matter, causing difficulties as noted in your blog. But the final, corrected, print is great. The contrasts of scale, of textured mark-making and the composition all work together to create an interesting image that in my view looks very competent, in no small way due to your dogged determination to succeed.

The landscape sketch made on the spot before you started to freeze in the cold is a super little thing too. It conveys a lot by minimal means.

I agree with your ‘Concluding reflections’. Particularly, that your lino blocks all need to be exactly the same size; and that a clear, worked-out colour image would be a great help. When you are cutting a block, you need to know exactly what is going to go where.

The project brief asks for colour explorations. This could have been an opportunity to “push your limits”, something which seemed to elude you, according to your blog. It may be helpful to think of this as ‘purposeful play’. For example, you could try reversing light/dark tonal relationships. Or try exploiting colour theory, say by using harmonising or contrasting colours rather than more realistic colours. What about very deliberate mis-registering and upside down printing? How about applying colour roughly with a brush? How about printing two different prints onto each other? Some back drawing? Yes, ugly things will happen; but hopefully something interesting will turn up too. The important thing is to recognise when something note-worthy has happened, and then exploit these happy accidents in future work. Another way you can approach experimentation is suggested below.

Poinsettia experiments: I feel these would have benefitted from a clearer direction or goal – perhaps something you’ve seen when doing artist research. If you have a destination in mind, your experiments will be more purposeful.

Sketchbooks

Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity

It is difficult to comment as your electronic submission did not include an extensive survey of your sketchbook. There appeared to be less activity than in Assignment 1, though this may not actually be the case. You clearly have an ability to draw and this has supported your print work. I was pleased to see evidence of the use of a range of media in both colour and black and white.

Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays

Context

Your blog is very thorough and well written. The Gallery section is enormously helpful in allowing an easily accessible view of your artwork itself. At Level 1 you could write less than you do; but this is a personal preference and if extensive writing helps you, please continue.

As before, your content covers visual and technical matters, research and reflection. There is discussion of how your researched artists may, or may not, influence your own practice. This is really good to see and will help you to better understand your own visual concerns and motivations.

I am pleased that you are so active in your artist research and gallery-going. Keep it up!

Suggested reading/viewing

Context

Looking at the work you have produced in this assignment, there seems to be a strong interest in texture over other possible visual concerns such as colour (for its own sake) or decorative effects, e.g. as seen in the Bawden’s work.

These printmakers may interest you. They work in a representational fashion and use texture, which are things that ‘chime’ with your assignment work:

http://www.peterluty.com/Original-Prints.html

http://www.jenniferjokhoo.com/

The next artist is a wood-engraver, but worth a look because again there is much use of texture, but this time more ‘poetry’ in the realism:

http://www.rowleygallery.com/Artist-Howard-Phipps.aspx

Many of your own researched artists use texture in a very deliberate way too, e.g. Clare Romano. It may be well worth paying particular attention to this aspect in further research.

Pointers for the next assignment

Next assignment: This requires you to make a multicolour linoprint using the reduction method. This technique can be tricky to understand. Please read the assignment guidance carefully, all the way through before you start work.

Additionally, I’ll provide my own explanation here of reduction linoprinting in the hope it helps your understanding:

Only one block is used to print all the colours. The big thing to realise is that any material removed from the block can no longer print, and this is the key to the method:

• First remove from the block any areas that need to allow the printing paper to show through, e.g. highlights, whites of eyes.

• Then print the lightest colour first (it is usual to print in a light-to-dark sequence, as the darker colours better cover the preceding lighter colours). Don’t think about background and foreground – it doesn’t work like that and will only confuse matters. Make sure to print ALL the paper for your edition run, plus an allowance for test sheets, proofs and spares etc.

• Remove the lino that needs to stay the first colour. This is the key to the whole process – it’s all about preventing over-printing on where you want that colour to remain.

• Print the second colour, again bearing in mind the light-to-dark sequence. You should now be seeing sheets with areas of unprinted paper, areas of your first colour safely preserved, and the new colour.

• Remove the lino that is to remain the second colour, so that it too cannot be overprinted.

• Print the third colour. Continue as above if there are still more colours to print.

• Finally, remove the lino that is to remain the last colour you printed.       This should leave you with a block consisting only of what is to be your black outline. Ink up and print this.

All being well, you should now have an edition of multi-colour prints with black outlines.