In some of the rooms, a solitary lampshade was left dangling when we arrived here. I have collected them and planned to use them both as a support to paint on and as a subject for still life.

They first appeared in Part 3, Project 2, Experiments with mark-making:

And I used one as a support for a fun way to close my rather dark drawings with masks  in 2.3 Narrative:

I am now arranging the lampshades in various ways for still life, piling them up instead of hanging them to take them out of their context.

Pencilsketches A4:

Sketches in Payne’s grey and Titanium White acrylics, A4:

I like these shapes and see that they have potential, but it is when I imagine to include the figure that I really start getting excited about this subject.

One advantage with the Covid 19 lockdown, is that my daughter and granddaughter have time to model.

Pencil sketches A4 in sketchbook:

Sketches on the walls of “Parallel project- empty room, modern cavepainting” ( see separate post):

A4 sketches in acrylics with Indian ink:

From here, I took a big leap to starting three big (100×120 cm) paintings in oil on canvas all at the same time:

This is unprecedented. What is happening here is that I am making a very clear and loud statement to the universe that “I am going to paint!”. I spent the last 20 years doing very sensible things before finally starting, so I am not ready to stop. Being in a household where very suddenly we do not have any foreseeable income at the moment, could bring up different ideas, but no- I will food garden and renovate and babysit and work- and I will definitely paint- on big expensive canvases in oil even 🙂

Letting my daughter and the little One wear the lampshades on their heads is a way I find to speak about a lot of the feelings coming up in these times. There is the feeling of not seeing where we are going, or even standing in front of a wall. There is an element of hiding as well. In one motive, my daughter poses nude, emphasizing the vulnerability of the now. In the other, where I photoshop my daughter and granddaughter together before painting them, they are wearing the soggy casual sweatpants that I see almost every day.

I start by covering a white canvas 100×120 cm with a military green acrylic coat.

Once starting in oils, I struggle for a really long time with the background. I have the idea to use a camouflage pattern, but then smudge it, so it is a camouflaged camouflage pattern.

 

I try this is many unsatisfying ways.

Finally I cover up the whole background with a rather monotonous military green in oil, similar to the acrylic background I started out with 2 days prior. The red stripes just happened, after I listened to a podcast about statistics on Soundcloud, which had similar wave patterns.

I am using a big flat brush all along for the figures, to avoid overworking.

This is the final painting.

I call it “Spring Summer 2020” like a fashion collection. I really like this painting myself. It shows the mixture of humor and fear I feel at the moment and I have captured something very personal in both my daughters and granddaughters postures that make them recognizable to me even with their heads covered.  I also like that this painting connects us and our unplanned time here all together with some of the odd old elements of the house that I connect to this parallel project- the lampshades.

The second painting is a nude with lampshade. I choose to paint this much more carefully and try to achieve the right flesh tones. I find that the more careful approach reflects the more vulnerable feeling of this painting.

I placed her in the corner, feeling trapped or without direction. The walls are crashing down on her, there is no spaciousness. I hesitate long about what to do with the floor, but decide to paint brick coloured tiles similar to the ones that are really here, to have a solid floor, instead of letting her hover in something more grey or non distinct.

These brickcoloured tiles could also be outside, which maybe brings more confusion to the painting, which I like.

This is the final painting:

I am happy with the motive and the feeling this painting transmits, but I was too careful in my choice of colours and precious little brushstrokes. I enjoy a bolder approach more.

The last painting does not exactly belong to this post, as it has lost the lampshade. I place it here though because it is a part of the same experience and just a few photos before the one that I chose for this painting, Ria was actually wearing the lampshade, but I prefer to paint her longing expression.

In all three , Ria is also wearing the same slippers and socks- an allusion to this time closed in the house.

I have started this last painting on a linen canvas that I have stretched ( also a new experience.)

I will post the painting here once completed.

At this point, I am just starting on Part 4 of the course, and can see how these lampshades may reappear in the project of Installation or maybe be used for the site specific artwork fro Assignment 4.

I also want to experiment further with using the lampshades as supports.

To be continued

 

 

 

 

 

I have used various glass panes as supports for a series on drowning around the well. Now I am considering how these pieces of glass already tell a story of their own. Especially, there is a couple of triangular pieces of glass, that tell the story of coming from a old car. I started out by imagining what narratives I would paint on these pieces of glass, when I realized that just looking at them, the imagination of the viewer could already see so many different stories around this car.

Maybe the pride of driving it shining new all those years ago, a kiss, a road trip, shopping, an accident…

I let these pieces tell their story themselves, by simply placing them in different spots on the entrance driveway or outside the garage.

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I am using “the empty room” that I describe in another blogpost as a sketchbook and include two small drawings on the walls about this car:

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In several of the rooms, a lampshade is left dangling from the ceiling and some curtains left on the window. In a way, these lonely left over objects just emphasize the emptiness of the room.

This room is to the North and always cold and dark. It has a weird shape and really low ceiling to one side. When I first saw it, it had very much very dark, heavy furniture in it and I can still feel the energy of this dark heaviness lingering. It took me a good while to even clean it out and it is definitely the space I have spent less minutes in.

I will change this by making “an empty room” one of the objects for the parallel project and by using this whole room as my sketchbook to record many of the stories I hear about the village.

I plan to start different stories at different parts of the walls and then continue the narratives til they meet and create a pattern over the room. At some point, these walls will be smashed and I will collect the stories as dust in a suitable box.

Hera I am, ready to start. A whole white room as my white page. And now I need to decide where to put down the tip of my pen.

The dangling lampshade seems to be the center around which the space moves and I climb the ladder to start there.

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I start with my neighbor Donna Maria’s account of her first memory from when she was 3 or 4 years old and still little enough to be carried by her mother.

When I switch on the light, I am so happy I chose to start at this point in the room:

I start another story on the wall to the East, about Maria Jose walking to school with her little brother, the 4 km to the nearest primary school.

On the back wall, her granddaughter has a dog called Boss.

I realize that all three stories start with relationships- to the mother, to the dog, to the brother. I decide to leave the Western wall to a lonely figure- Donna Laura from the house on the other side of ours.

Her story is very sad. I will let it evolve around the figure in time.

I have written another blogpost about all the glass I have found, and some of the pieces are clearly from a car. I decide to let other parts of the walls start with stories about the cars from which these glasses came- using this room as a sketchbook:

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I prepared several different pens, with the idea of letting fainter drawings lie further back in time than thicker, clearer drawings. I will let go of this though, as I will use the walls more freely and allow myself to grab whatever pen is at hand at the moment.

Spinning these drawings together in stories adds the dimension of time engrained in the piece, as well as the two-dimensionality of the drawings and the three-dimensionality of the whole room.

I will resume the drawings now again on this fresh coat of paint. There will probably not be any grand finale with breaking the walls and collecting the dust, but this room will still be the sketchbook for the stories.

Suddenly we also live full time in the unrenovated house with all the family, due to the lock down, so today it occurred to me that our presence, our life here will weave into the sketchbook entries on these walls too. We already belong to the story of this house.

The new map of this “empty room” looks like this:

The motives of the sketches on the walls here will connect to all other parts of the parallell project.

Our presence here first appeared with small sketches from a photoseries I did with my daughter and granddaughter wearing  lampshades on their heads:

 

These are sketches for oil paintings that I logged more about under the part of the parallel project “lampshades”.

Also a sketch of my daughter longingly looking through the window after way too long in this house for quarantine:

To be continued