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• when researching the artist Joseph Eskubi, I found his insomnia works to be really dark and mysterious. I wanted to take his distorted figures and respond in my own way. Doing this, I learned to work more freely and experiment and be messy with my brush strokes, which is something I’ve always struggled with.
I’m definitely interested in looking at the distortion of figures to represent insomnia.

• continuing to push myself in the way I paint, I decided to research Frank Auerbach. His work really fascinates me and I find that in this project I will really be influenced by him especially his colours and brush strokes.
I really enjoyed playing with colours and especially being really messy with my brush strokes, I’m excited to try and do a looser painting, maybe on glass, rather than super detailed.

• I really loved painting on glass. It was so different to canvas and I really liked how the paint went on smoothly and looked creamy. I took inspiration from Frank Auerbach with the colours and the bold brush strokes and I really liked the outcome. One of my friends said it looked as if the figure was floating which I think describes the feeling of insomnia nicely. I think if I were to develop it I would make it more dark and elongate the face and body making it look sickly.

• I think I want to experiment more between the palette knife and the brush because I want to see if it makes my paintings look harsher.
• I found the palette knife makes my paintings look more textured and harsher, which I liked. It was really fun working with the palette knife and more messy than the paint brush. Everything merged together with the palette knife, which I found interesting.

• I tried using the palette knife on canvas to experiment more and to work larger, but I didn’t really like the look of it. In my sketchbook it looked much better but working on a larger scale it made the palette knife look weird. I found it to look too messy. I might just need to experiment more with it, or experiment with both the paint brush and palette knife to see the effect that would give.

• I actually really liked the look of palette knife and paint brush, I really like the texture. At the moment the big thing I’m trying to work on is my colour scheme. It’s hard figuring what colours I like the most. I’ve been experimenting with a lot of colours but I really connected with blue, yellow and burnt sienna. I just really like the combination of those three especially the yellow tones.
• so far I’ve experimented on Perspex, glass and canvas. I really enjoy working on Perspex because the application is smooth and creamy. I also really like the effect of when the sun beams on the Perspex and then the paint looks eerie. But the one thing that the canvas has that Perspex doesn’t have is the 3D look because it pops off the wall. I really like the 3D look.
• the one thing I’ve struggled with is trying to represent how insomnia feels, it’s a really hard thing. I’ve tried to use sickly colours on the figure to represent how it feels but I feel like I haven’t represented it fully yet, so I hope to develop my ideas. I’ve been researching Barbara Kroll. Her figures really interest me because they’re bony and scary looking.

•composition wise, I’ve also been inspired by Barbara Kroll and also Frank Auerbach. I love how they place their figures in obscure ways, so I’ve been responding to their works a lot. I’ve learnt to be expressive with my figures and I’m interested in pushing that expressionistic idea further and really exaggerate on facial features.

•I started a new painting on a smaller canvas to just experiment with my mark making and my figures. I really got a good feel about the mark making in this painting and the painting feels dream like and looks kind of unsettling due to the way the figure is reaching out, which I like. I think it helps looking at a lot of artists and how they portray the human figure because I was struggling to portray the figure compositional wise and after researching a few more artists such as Munch and Kenneth Blom, I’ve had a few more ideas.
• I’m exited to experiment and paint on wood. I want to see how different it is compared to canvas and Perspex, so I can decide which material I want to paint on for my final outcome. I decided to prime the woods yellow because I wanted that cool tone to come out and because yellow is going to be one of the main colours I work with. I decided to work on the background instead of the figures first like I usually do, and this time I really struggled to create a colour I really liked compared to my other paintings. I think at first I added too much blue to the painting and I wanted it to have more yellow tones in it like my other painting which was my favourite due to the yellow background. So I added more yellow and white which eventually created a colour I liked. I think In the future I should always start with the figure first because I start to work too much in the background and I want more details in the figures.

It was hard setting both wood panels up together because they had to be perfectly straight so they were lined up. I struggled with this at first because there wasn’t enough space but then I just had to improvise and place things underneath the woods to line it up which fixed the problem.
I found it a bit overwhelming at first to work on these wood panels because they were quite big together and I didn’t really like how long it looked so I decided to cut them down a bit more to make the shape more rectangular. I found it much better after I did that and it made my painting feel much better because before there was just too much space.

I really liked working with two wood panels because it created the effect that I wanted which was a broken feel. Overall, I really enjoyed working on this painting, it was something new to me working on two panels, but I really liked the look of it and the feel. But in the future I would like to do another version on canvas to see if it's better with a harsher texture.

FMP Reflective journal

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