Colour 5

"Bring in an A4-sized black and white photograph. A blowup of your passport photo, maybe."

For "expressive colour" we were to paint three (or more) versions. First, tracing the light and dark areas and transferring the picture to paper, then putting masking tape round the area to be painted. A demonstration of how to use colour to show different moods -

I experienced intense frustration with the clunky brushes and the runnyness of the paint ("the poor workman blames the tools") - and that helped me "let go" and just get on with it. All the time, you're watching yourself and assessing not just how but why you're doing what you're doing, and trying to find out what you need to know, and how to get that information. I need to watch people using brushes to apply paint, see what they do that I could try.

Another thing that helped was working with the paper upside down, to get away from ingrained notions of what a face should be.

There was time to do another, larger painting. Upside down again, without drawing it first -

Here you have many degrees of removal from "reality". You're seeing a photograph on a screen of the person and the starting point of the painting is a photocopy of a printout of a digital photograph. In all these transformations, has information - or value - been lost, or added?

Lots of activity in the rest of the room -

And an exciting variety of results -

It's interesting to see my paintings on screen and consider how different they looked in real and in the context of all these others. I was pleased with the outcome, after the little hissy fit with the yellow paint, and feel I've really moved on. And got favourable comments. But painting isn't likely to be one of my subject choices. We have to choose our areas in the next week or so. There are a lot of factors to be considered in this!