Project Proposal.

In this project I want to expand on the work I did last year by carrying on with my portraiture, in particular I want to work on expanding the depths of the images I create through further layering the paint and ink of the faces, utilising a larger range of colour and tone to break the boundary between suggesting reality in my paintings, and actually painting realistic looking images that are tainted with expressionist feeling, to heighten the sense of emotion and despair in the imagery. I basically believe that I have been working at a technical ability akin to a college student, and so I need to expand and push my abilities to further my skill and technique, in a way that will benefit my range of abilities, and benefit the pieces I am striving to create.

When starting up I want to throw myself straight into painting portraiture – a variety of images both primary and secondary source, working from black and white printed off pictures as I did last year, but integrating larger amounts of paint slowly but surely as I move on from piece to piece, easing my way into the practice. I expect to produce many pieces of varying sizes, keeping me on edge so I don’t settle into creating pieces all the same. While I may be weeding the inks out as far as shaping and shading the faces, I will still be utilising the inks to highlight and pick up on particular aspects of facial features, to accentuate the emotions and heightening them hopefully by bringing them out from the face.

I expect to take up a lot of wall space, given the size of my pieces and that I hope to always have a piece to work on, and I hope to have plenty of meetings and feedback from my peers/teachers to keep me in check and always analysing my own progress. I believe that if I expect to develop my technique and technical ability, as well as build upon and expand into a much more ambitious way of working to better express the faces and emotions I hope to portray.

My work over the last two years has taken on a few drastic changes, from size of canvas, media and even style, however I shall be feeding on what I learnt in the last year upon the pieces I created to exhibit finally, and so I shall be hopefully carrying on with similar skills and techniques and expanding upon them with the usage of different media, and taking inspiration from contemporary artists such as Lucian Freud, Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon, as well as artists I have seen in recent exhibitions such as Geraldine Swayne and Zbynek Sedlecky of whom were both exhibited as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2010, and Lucian Freud I saw in the Pompidou in Paris over summer.

The images that I hope to acquire will be from a number of sources, however all shall be changed to black and white to accommodate the emotions of myself to influence colour choice and my own artistic preferences. I expect to pull my images from mainly secondary sources, to then change them and drastically bring out the emotions the people have been enslaved by, whether on the internet, papers, magazines or even collaged imagery.

© Dean Ross.