This is my web page for FIN 120 – Painting and Color Perception
I am looking forward to this course, though with a degree of trepidation. To date I have completed 10 units of Fine Arts courses as part of my journey to my Associate of Arts, but of those 10, only two courses – FIN 110,Drawing and 2D language and FIN 140 Creative Process, both in 2019, challenged me to make physical marks on paper, many of the other courses were digital format, which I found myself more comfortable with. I find myself now enrolled in the Fine Art Diploma program, which I’m sure would be a great shock to my school art teacher in 1966, Mr. Hussein, who took the charcoal out of my hand when trying to visualize Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poem “Xanadu” which had left me bemused, and suggested that art was not the course for me. Sarah Vipond persuaded me otherwise and I shall always be grateful to her for that.
It was interesting to learn that our first unit of this course in “Color” perception involved the use of black and white paints only, but we learned that the purpose of this was to get a greater understanding of the concept of “value” and also to become comfortable with expressive mark making. Our first assignment related to value and abstraction. We made a series of marks on paper, one with a white back ground and another with a dark background. These building blocks were to be taken forward to create a collage.
Above are the three building blocks. I managed to misunderstand the instructions, which were to make two cropped details and mount them separately on a piece of white paper. One of the studio examples I seem to recall showed the cropped details incorporated into the final collage and this is what I did. I need to be less hasty and reflect more on what is required and how to achieve it. We were also to take other strips from our source material and incorporate them in our collage. I was quite happy with my cropped details, but struggled a little to see how to incorporate them well into a collage.
Here are the two cropped sections, I liked the way the drips of very dilute paint left only the outline of their presence and also in contrast to the organic drips the other section was much more jagged
So here is the completed collage. During the critique everyone was very kind, as they always are in fine art critique, finding positive things to say, and I particularly liked Pam’s thoughtful comment that the completed piece was a little violent, which was not my intention, though in retrospect I think my mark making tends to comprise quick short strokes and I think that comes through in my self portrait as well.