Category: Exhibitions & Books

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Lisbon Study Trip

I recently attended the OCA Lisbon study visit. The trip was three days of Gallery visits lots of walking and sketching on location. Our tutors were Michelle Whiting and Diana Ali. This is the first study visit I have attended and the first time that I have met any OCA tutors and students. We arrived on the Monday and met with the other students at the hotel for dinner where we introduced ourselves before retiring to our rooms to prepare for the next day. We met in the morning and there we met our tutors and the rest of our fellow students. After our introduction we left for our first outing.

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Roof top restaurant – The House of Wonders 

These three days were packed with visits to various places. We visited the Museo Berardo where we had an interesting guided tour of a contemporary gallery, my knowledge of contemporary art is very limited, so it was very helpful to have the guide explain the pieces in the gallery. I left with a very different view of these types of artwork than when I went in. We also visited the Paula Rego exhibition at the Casa das Historias which showed a vast collection of her sketchbook work as well as some of her final pieces. I found this exhibition to be extremely inspirational and relative to my studies. I like that she used her art to get a message across, mostly political and quite controversial. It was great seeing her sketches the line style she used the mediums and her experimentation.

 

We got to see some beautiful sites including the botanical Gardens which hosted an array of cockerel’s and hens, Peacocks, ducks and terrapins, the castle on the sea which was like something out of a fairy-tale with its little beach cove, a harbour and PADA artist in residence in Barreiro, who gave us access to restricted industrial estate that had incredible views across the water of the whole city of Lisbon and a great many thing to draw.

My PADA sketch
My sketch at PADA

I really enjoyed meeting my fellow students and tutors. We ate amazing food, had a great time with plenty of laughs and I learned a lot from them all and from our visits as well as the guides from the museums. I got to push myself out of my comfort zone a little bit and try new things and it was very interesting seeing my fellow students work and the ways that they approached this. I came back very excited to get back in my studio and am looking forward to incorporating the things that I learnt on the study visit into my future work. I hope to stay in touch with the other students that I met and will hopefully see them again at other study visits. The tutors did an amazing job of organising the trip, giving us a great experience that I will treasure.  I had such a great time and am so glad that I went, I really hope that OCA runs more of these types of study trips.

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Photo at PADA – Property of Ashley Mclaughlin

Gallery visit – David Hockney Exhibition

I went to visit the David Hockney exhibition at the Light Box gallery in Woking, Surrey today. He’s not an artist who’s work I knew of, although I’m sure I’ve heard the name before.

I was impressed by how varied his work was. He had oil pairings, inkjet painting that he’s done when inkjet was first released. He had ink line drawing work and he had even experimented with pressed pulp drawings where he made his own papers, incorporating the image he wanted to make into the process, so that the pressed paper itself was the piece of art.

They exhibited a letter he had written to a friend, where he sounded extremely happy and excited about his work and what he had been learning during his experimentation. This was a nice glimpse into his thoughts about how he felt about his work. I really liked his experimental style. But the one thing I told away from the visit was that although some of his works were perfected to a high level, most were not. Most of them had brush marks, you could see the pencil under-drawings, some looked half finished and if an artist today released his inkjet art I don’t think it would go down so well. But he was incentive with the new materials he had at the time, he was exploring and experimenting and was not afraid to make a ‘bad mark’. I remember seeing the same things when I went to the Comic Museum in London. The work was amazing, but they too had left brush strokes or felt marks and made errors that they the cut out new paper, placed it over the top and repairing the section and used stark white highlights that look like they had been painted in tipex.

After the visit, when I was reflecting on my own work and working practices I realised how hard I am on myself and my work. I am always striving for perfection and spend a lot of time making sure there are no brush marks and lines that aren’t in the wrong place.

I guess what I’m learning is that perfection is overrated and that I really should let go a little and experiment more. Which ties in very nicely with my next exercise which is to create a sketchbook with different materials or types of paper and using different mediums experimenting the different effects I can make. I am quite excited about this exercise as this is something I never do. Although I have been using and learning more and more mediums i.e. watercolour, gouache, pastels, I will always use the appropriate corresponding paper and I have not pushed past that and tried more unconventional materials. I am looking forward to doing more gallery visits to get inspired and see the way others worked.