Ink Stain Drawing

I have always been fascinated by stories, devouring books as a young child, writing tales of my own and evolving as I grew up into a deep love of film, combining the two elements I thrive on the most: imagery and narrative. In the third year of university I started to look in depth at the construction of a film: how do images go together to form a cohesive plot, which elements or scenes are crucial to this? How do light, shadow, camera angle, focus, objects and location play a part in intriguing and capturing your imagination, enabling the viewer to pick up on the essence of an idea and sparking off their imagination so they themselves bring something to the viewing experience. I originally used film scenes to look into this but soon wanted to set up my own stills, engage in my own ideas. I began to collect objects: dice, insects, cameras, letters, papers, anything I could find that had a sense of intrigue about it. I then played around with setting up small still lifes, lighting them differently, changing the focal point to emphasise a certain item and then working these into paintings. I became more involved in the process of this, enjoying the translation of light into paint, the properties of pigments and the challenge of photorealism. The fact that I can get more detail into a painting than I can from a photograph, I can enhance and play around with oversaturated colour and light. The vivid colour of the chosen objects reflecting the nature of their temptation and their glossy, sleek appeal. The dice open up questions of fate, chance and the curveball effect and perhaps these objects drew me to them by the very fact that they are caught up in forces larger than themselves. This lead me to look into these areas but I have constantly thought about how to reintroduce the narrative, how to bring a character back in, reflecting my view that your ideas are a constant theme, looping and milling around your head until they find their way out over time through different avenues. I listen to audiobooks as I paint, watch films as I draw in the evenings and make endless notes from these two sources to feed my thought process. I began to bring the story more to the forefront with the use of black and white imagery, stripping away colour, leaving objects or locations as the central element but at the same time introducing a person.