I'm feeling furious. I have 5 days home alone to work on anything I want to and I feel like the time is slipping away and I haven't achieved anything.
I've been to the forest three times and sketched twice (the third time was with my Dad so I couldn't sketch but did discover some new places in a different pat of the forest). I wrote a list of what I wanted to achieve:
5 sketches
1 etching plate
5 monoprints
So far I've done 2 sketches and am feeling very positive about them. I started one in the forest, then it started raining, and the dog was digging a hole behind me, throwing clods of mud at my back so I gave up but made sure I had the basics down. I finished it off later at home and was really pleased with the result. You can see the raindrops behind the tree trucks.
The second sketch was done completely in the forest (with slightly less mud being flung at me, but a far bigger hole resulting!). For this one I tried to focus on capturing the essence of what I could see as well as looking at the page a lot and drawing what I remembered and what suited me rather than trying to capture exactly what was in front of me. This felt very feeing. This was a result of some of the feedback from unit 2 which suggested working from memory.
I've been meaning to write me response to the Unit 2 feedback, but still don't have the research paper feedback yet so it feels incomplete. The feedback on the work is mainly questions, but I think it's thrown me a little, I don't quite know why but it's not what I was expecting. I like it, it's really useful, but I also really want the paper feedback!
I wrote out a little summary to try to process it all:
I was planning on trying to make a print a day over these 5 days as suggested in the feedback but this isn't something that comes naturally to me at all. I made a whole load of mono prints using the grasses and things foraged in the forest but these almost feel to 'easy'. I can churn out loads of these and while I think they are beautiful and have value, I also think this is cheating. I could really easily do this every day but it's not really moving my work on.
The one think I did notice was that having been printing from the grasses and bracken it made me really look at how much undergrowth there is in the forest, how all the things besides the trees are really important to the aesthetic of the forest, and how the palette of the forest seems to be most changed by the undergrowth rather than the canopy in so many places because of so many of the trees being evergreen. This feels like an important realisation and something to hold onto.
I'm feeling incredibly frustrated because I have spent a day trying to get a plate to etch using grasses etc and it either wouldn't work and when it FINALLY did I realised it's not an interesting print:
I was trying to replicate the effect I managed with the stitchwort where I used soft ground and pressed it into the ground, somehow when I etched it it etched around the plant... this hasn't and I'm furious because I've made this mistake before and realised it looks rubbish yet I've wasted a day and a half only to be left with the same thing.
I've sanded the plate back (again!) but this time I've left some of these marks on it and think I might have a go at trying some spit bite. I thought I could mix some of the acid with gum arabic (to break the surface tension) and paint it on trying to paint a rough view of the forest. It might be interesting.... we shall see!