From having my crit on Wednesday, I gained lots of information, opinions and ideas from my fellow students as well as my lecturer.

The overall ideas created from my project so far were very mixed! Some ideas included that it represented body image and confidence with the intertwining limbs as well as the different coloured images representing different emotions (changing the whole atmosphere of each piece). One student even mentioned it reminded her of 1980’s Grace Jones work.

Throughout my crit, I got some great advice allowing me to build upon my project in the future. The main ‘success’ they noted about my work were the collages I had created in my sketchbook. These progressed my project, and some advice was to create larger ones as well as combining them with my paintings. One particular idea that I gravitated towards, were creating layers within my work, changing the opacity of different limbs (in different colours too) like how my initial emulsion prints were. In addition to this, I should also make my work to a bigger scale which I am currently trying to do but, with difficulty accessing the studio and materials, this has been slightly restricted. Another comment I received was that my painting using the circle canvas reminded the student of a black hole with no end which I really liked the idea of. From there, I had the thought about doing a very large circle canvas whilst painting my body parts smaller, using different opacities to create an uneasy sense of space. I also already wanted to develop my own work by including more obvious mark making techniques, so using more palette knives, thicker brushes and less specific details.

Some interesting artists I was recommended to research in context with my project included:

Jenny Saville – Specifically how she approaches and paints skin.

Egon Schiele – Figurative but using odd methods to paint body parts, which are similar to mine having that haunting, unsettling atmosphere.

Diego Velazquez & Francis Bacon – Bacons uncomfortable ‘Screaming Pope’ (stemming from Velazquez’s’ original painting) was suggested to me as it emanated the, unintentional, horror like pose similar to my pieces.

Overall my painting crit was immensely useful as I now have a much better idea as to what direction to next go in. I would definitely like to work larger, however, have limited space back at home out of the studio so will try to paint as large as I can! I am also going to be experimenting more with collage and possibly combining this with my painting to add another element. The main idea I came away from my crit with, is changing the opacity of my figurative work giving it another sense of space and narrative, as well as adding to the uncomfortable feeling I am hoping to achieve.