For the tutorial week session, I discussed ideas around how I could progress my work further from last term with Mr. Gino Attwood. Coming out of the session, I began thinking of how I could create real meaning behind my art, rather than just creating for no reason. For me, the latter hasn’t worked out so well, so I created a large mind map in my book expressing a few of my interests and aspects I am passionate in.

From here, I decided to use some of the DMU bursary money to purchase some materials that I believe will help me start to experiment within my project. One aspect in particular that I want to focus on is how poetry has been used throughout art history and how I want to incorporate it into my work. I purchased the ‘Gigantic Cinema – A weather anthology’ edited by Alice Oswald & Paul Keegan to help stimulate how I could combine my love of poetry and the weather. I also bought some different shaped canvases and more paints in order to begin my experimentation process.

As I have a limited amount of space to create at home, I used my sketchbook to create some observational sketches so I could grasp what I was keener to pursue. Using graphite and charcoal, I produced several drawings, seeing how different mediums and thicknesses changed the finished look of them.

In addition to weather and poetry, an aspect I am especially inspired by is the feminist movement. The role I would like to portray within my work is the power and intensity it has, and women have grown to have, and how this can be represented through painting. Using weather’s ferocity, I feel it is represented perfectly and is something I would like to experiment and discover. The colour red is also a element that stands out for me, so through collages I have tried to express this (possibly linking it to the iconic television series ‘The Handmaids Tale’ based on the book written by Margaret Attwood).

I then began to use extracts from my poetry book to visualise how I see and feel the weather, using inspiration from artists such as Turner and motives from the ecofeminist strand that I would further like to build upon throughout this project. This time, I not only experimented with graphite but also watercolour to see how this could change the atmosphere. I have included a time-lapse of the larger graphite drawing for reference (although this was not the finished piece) and the process I used to create it, filing graphite on first then rubbing it away.