Completing Project 10.

I’ve been encouraged to trust my instincts as to direction and I’ve experienced this as very supportive, given my more evolutionary than planned way of working. The meaning of ‘project plan’ only became clear at a recent studio meeting when all of us at Stage 3 discovered it was meant to apply to each individual project. That is, a plan for each project rather than an over-arching plan for all of the projects. Retrospective compliance plainly isn’t feasible but I suggest that the spirit of my work and my reflection upon it should meet the inherent criteria.

The elements

For this, I scrolled through my posts from December 2023 through to the present and, if sheer volume is a contributing factor to indications of progress, then progress has definitely been made! I began by counting the numbers of images per post and gave up when these became unmanageable without a spreadsheet. The number of completed images, as in paintings I deemed ‘done’ for project submission purposes, was my next criterion but even that was daunting. So I settled on impressions. Looking at where I began this unit, what the key growing edges were and how I might describe the point at which I’d landed.

One thing was clear, beginning with legacy units which I’d acquired before the course heaved, mutated, and popped out of its chrysalis as a new and ultimately magical beast, I had become more painterly. Some of this arose through trying to paint more loosely and this from https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/01/30/3-2-part-1-consolidate-and-experiment/ seemed to be one of the first examples. I was pleased with the sense of movement I’d made in the water, and how the less defined hills in the distance were more convincing than some of my ‘accurate’ representations. These were also quite small paintings for me and so a particular achievement for more than one reason.

This was the point too where I came across Saul Leiter, a photographer who slid semi transparent second images onto the first, making a whole which was rather surreal but also ultimately very separate and grounded. I began experimenting with this in my paintings, going back to large scale and, with encouragement, setting the original painting as the anchor then digitally adding the low opacity image, usually something intrusive such as a brutal concrete bridge into a landscape. The combined image then often led to a new story which I began telling as ‘tombstones’ or labels drawing on my experience as a writer to generate flash fiction, haikus, short poems, or very brief but incisive commentary to sit alongside the image.

I was very encouraged to find that my hybrid art – painting, video, AR, and possibly text – will have validity as elements of my future submissions and assessments.

Coming back to the painting, what do I think has changed and what has grown a spine so it’s able to stand up for itself? I have always been someone who rarely did the same thing twice – short fiction, flash fiction, long short story, short short story, novella? Well, all of those and no specialisms. Interestingly though, and probably because of the much longer journey required for a part-time BA than an MA, I’ve begun to see elements of me in very diverse products and I realise that this is the equivalent of the writer’s voice, which I can also now see.

The most obvious is the directionality of my mark-making. I’m lefthanded and since childhood I have tried to make my left hand do what other peoples’ right hands do. Writing for instance – right-handers pull the pen across the page, lefties push it. This makes a difference because one is smooth, the other gouges a track through the paper. But, nothing I do will be easily replicated by a righthander. My way of seeing will be informed by the hemisphere processing that information and my ways of understanding will be underpinned by routinely being the odd one out. This worked well for hockey, not so much for learning the violin.

I think also I am much more confident about editing a painting; about letting it settle to give me time to see the unwanted irregularities – and increasingly these are areas I’ve over-worked. Where I haven’t yet established firm foundations is in stopping at stages where the lightness and looseness of the work is obvious now I’ve corseted it in swathes of paint. I know this from taking photos at almost every stage and seeing too late where I should have stood back. My triumph is in recognising this; my next triumph will be in recognising it in time. At least the work is digitally in existence and not lost forever to any chance of learning from it.

Beyond this is the compunction to tell a story. My work, and now I include the digital layers and ways of displaying it, must be saying something, even when that thing is just Merry Christmas, as much of it is at the moment. The current project has been to recruit as many house owners as possible to my ‘digital decoration’ mission in which I’ve put AR onto the fronts of the houses, visible, should there be a signal, via the Artitive app. I made a video in which they feature in order and sent this to our MP to show him what could be done if we had adequate connectivity. Bright, brilliant decorations with no physical impact on the infrastructure, no projectors, no massive energy costs. This is the pretty version, he already knows we could die waiting for an ambulance that doesn’t know we need it; (No Signal No Help). Next year, I want to use children’s Christmas paintings as the artwork to be animated and digitised.

I may be deluded but I really do think I could be on the way to becoming a painter who writes, a writer who makes videos, and a video maker who paints quality pictures.

The Primary Content

https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/11/14/resistance/ The painting is based on a photograph of the solar panels on my fence at the bottom of my garden and is probably the most sparse of my pieces of work to date. The rather spooky shade in the middle is my shadow. The panels later became a matter of concern to the neighbour because the fence, it turned out, is his and not mine. So for now, they are propped up in the garden gathering no photons at all while I find out where the council will let me put them. The title, ‘Resistance’, reflects my considered response to this somewhat controlling man who has been trying to coerce me into selling him the bottom of my garden for decades by making misogynistic remarks from the top of a ladder. The video uses greenscreen to turn the fence into a very wide screen through which to ‘project film’ and the film being projected here concerns life on earth. He would not understand that it doesn’t physically exist, but he would demand that I take it down even though he could not see it. I made the video in PowerDirector using one of my earlier collage paintings of a fish which I animated and distorted using masks.

Film-making has become something I am beginning to see as a mature conclusion to what I’m also beginning to see as a more mature kind of painting. And as always, there must be a narrative because I am a storyteller.

https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/12/02/pepperscoombe-christmas-videos/ The polar opposite of the above is the Christmas displays I am putting on houses in our lane. I invited people to send me photos of their house front so that I could ‘decorate’ them and put the finished piece on YouTube where they could share it with anyone they wish. I said I wanted to have a trial run with just a few houses this year with a view to decorating as many as possible next year using children’s artwork wherever possible. The first is the local takeway which has something on it most of the year. I’ve explained it to the owners, shown them what happens when you point the Artivive app at their wall, and assured them that nothing is damaged in the process. I’m not sure how much of that has made sense to them but they approved and every so often I remind them. The following seven are all houses in the lane showing off-the-peg material, but the sixth is a drawing by someone who may be a child but may also be a person with cognitive impairments. The work was mediated by a person who seems to live with them and tells me they are absolutely delighted with the result to the extent they were going to do more drawings for me!

I’ve had a real opportunity with this trial to experiment with overlays and greenscreen, and to find different ways of putting quite large amounts of material into compressed videos that resolve well and are relatively easy to upload to Artivive – which people are now beginning to ask for. This helps me in thinking about my degree show and wondering how people would feel about hosting paintings/works that were not so twinkly and how I would show the more gritty material. Public buildings in Brighton remain an option although I can imagine there will be a quantity of paperwork and meetings with the council.

https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/11/17/rooftop-cosmology/  The recent aurora was one of those occasions when, much like the Concord years, people were walking about looking at the sky instead of where they were going. This time we also had phones and it was dark. The first of us to see pink let out a squawk and we all reoriented like Papparazzi on a ‘sleb’. One person refused to believe it was real if it could only be seen on a phone and was having none of the scientific arguments about light frequencies and camera sensitivities. I came away with pink sky cushions.

The painting process was a little less straightforward than many of my others in that a particular style suggested itself to me, which I quite liked but which rendered the clouds more as boulders than ethereal entities with no real form at all, and so it underwent some radical transformations via applications of varnish, layers of white acrylic, hints of pink, hints of green, minimisation of these, and some scouring to hint at folds. The end result places the focus just above the houses but with the weight of this cosmic influence hanging above.

https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/11/28/sabre-shrub/ It began as a windowsill pot plant and matured into a sabre-wielding devil full of insects benefitting from their inaccessibility. The colours of mature leaves were like iced jade and just as deadly. Eventually, after four (at least) relocations, it began to subside, collapsing in on itself like a burned-out sun.

I haven’t tried to paint foliage in any kind of detail before and this was the equivalent of a massive still life. But what happened, both with the subject and the paint, was an unexpected, slightly surrealistic, fantasia. This almost certainly came from the bare branches of the Rhus typhus or Sumach behind it which looked to me increasingly like a crown of antlers, for which I hold the Game of Thrones franchise responsible. I probably should have stopped somewhere between images 7 and 12 or 13 but instead, I kept on adding leaves for some reason that barely resolved itself beyond a bald impression of it ‘not being done’. Luckily, I have all the versions digitally available to me for use in videos and other kinds of output and another reminder that stopping, as I had with Resistance, still needs work. A spontaneous edit late in the day changed the appearance from something I was convincing myself was satisfactory to a painting I feel I can take some pride in. The foliage pleases me, especially given I don’t do still life studies; and the surreal nature of both the regularised building on the left to the slightly abstract shaping of the landscape behind the shrub over to the centre and the right feel as though they just fell into place.  It makes a fine Christmas card (and has), but it can just as easily become a terrifying alien creature that, like Dr Who’s Weeping Angels, can instantaneously be right behind you from 20 metres away.

Elsewhere, I think what I see is an identity that is evident in the extremes of difference and encompasses the mid-ground. Commonalities include:

1. Narrative. Whatever I do has to have purpose but beyond that, I think I am incapable of not finding a narrative or story in the images I make, and often not from the outset. The image drives the story and the story contributes to the image, so expanding this into the short pieces of descriptive or fictional creative writing feels as natural as extending the visual layers of a painting into video, audio, and AR.
2. A style that begins thin and light and then builds to a textured whole. This may or may not be successful but the fact of it is an undeniable characteristic of my work, as is my tendency to scrub paint off, layer it with varnish, and look for the slithering slide in my brushwork as a new pleasure.
3. A repertoire of relatively limited palettes that range from overwhelmingly green (eg Autumn Path, https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/09/16/autumn-path/ ) to pale greys with angular lines (the Nomad series, https://conboyhillarts.com/2024/11/01/neoele/ ) but allow within each piece of work, a contrasting colour such as red to lift it from the ordinary. I’ve worked quite hard to avoid gimmicky splashes of colour, they have to earn their place.
4. A taste for BIG which is a longstanding feature of my work.
5. The inclusion of ‘labels’ in the form of short literary commentaries which vary in style from the prosaic to the poetic.

Additional supporting work

Simplicity – the collaged fish

Phases of Fish

The Nomad series: following the destruction of the earth by the approach of a wandering planet

Nomad: arrival

Nomad: extraction

Nomad: deconstruction (and why we need space travel)

The Time Tunnel painting

Landscape ‘Time tunnel’ Project 7

The Procreate cartoon animations – prompted by a tutorial discussion.

Procreate animations – the journey continues

Conclusions

This is the penultimate unit of Level 3 and so I’ve had in mind both my progress as a painter and my ambition to take art onto the streets in ways that offer both that primary painting element and also digital engagement through video, audio, and AR layers projected into or through target images such as public buildings.

I feel I’ve taken a big step forward in this ambition by recruiting a core of local householders to the video component of a display which in itself is likely to interest others for a later display.

Engaging the interest of our local MP would allow me to present again the issue of poor local connectivity provision alongside the possibilities this technique has for communicating with and entertaining a wider population via public posters and leaflets.

These projects, realised and as yet unrealised, have underpinned my development of film-making, whether by the selection and positioning of off-the-shelf effects or the selective use of PowerDirector’s on-board chroma key to render whole patches of an image as textured video and to clip the film track thereby limiting its visibility to selected tracts. Just being able to articulate this is a stupendous achievement for me because it means it has become an option and that I can explain the process to myself if not, as yet, to anyone else.

I expect to build on this in the next and final unit with a view to presenting a unique body of work, possibly shown digitally rather than in a gallery, which I can see developing beyond the trap of the one-trick-pony. I understand this process but even more I understand how my own cognitive processes underpin it. I am a stepwise creative; I reach a plateau and everything stops, but if I leave it alone it will have transmogrified into a next step which will likely appear to have come from nowhere.

SCH 2024

Saul Leiter https://www.saulleiterfoundation.org/