Midterm Critique/self evaluation

Yesterday's critique was extremely useful, also in context to people's responses to things.

I've got a lot of positive feedback on the fabric, and also people telling me to use it more. I would like to at least start responding to it in the same way that surrealists do (Might do a small set of studies involving this), but including it in the figures in some fashion would be useful. And emulating different patterns within the figures, which is something I've been interested in doing for a long time. On "The sleep of reason", the spotty pattern people responded to was sort of like that, though usually i do it more extensively.

Here's probably a good time to upload the shit i do for hobby art:

 I make these characters who often have symbolic associations and some of them end up being used in paintings and such (though not all of them). They're not terribly serious, but color/pattern/texture comes into them (these ones being relatively calm/simple examples), and that interest in color/texture/etc is echoed in my paintings I think. This tendency is directly informing how I make AON every time and the patterns I find on AON, which people seemed to like. So I'll do it more.

I've been encouraged again to give consideration to the display of the things. I recall some people liking them up on the wall (which, ideally, is how i'd display them), but my thoughts of mounting them on scrollforms etc were well received.

I have been making deliberate sacrifices to western perspective styles in my paintings but that is only seen as effective in the big red tapestry-cloth painting; in the Sleep of Reason it looks accidental, which means my intention is unclear and that's a problem. Thinking of putting objects ON the desk to make it's clear that it's been tipped up to show the top surface along the side, though then that might still look accidental (since most people still think it's accidental and a product of lack of skill in N. Renn paintings, I'm probably unlikely to break this trend in thinking no matter how intentionally I do it.) I probably should replace the chair in that painting with something less office depot, too.

Brook actually had an idea for my rendered watercolors, which are extremely poorly served by going up next to my splattery drawings and my big paintings (but I still like doing them!). She suggested binding them in a book together, so that they could be as much of an object as the paintings are.

And of course my splattery drawings got good response and I will carry on with them, despite the tragic toll they take on my pen nibs. They are sacrificed for a greater cause.

I'm happy with how ambitious I've been with size and with the amount of materials experimentation I've been doing; results have been good, and even the failures are useful. I'm somewhat less happy with hte large painting that has been stalling, so i shall take trace's advice and put some thread on that to see how that goes.

I'm not entirely happy with how productive I've been, but I never really am. I feel like i could spend more time painting (but doing so would probably involve spending less time doing stuff for other classes, and therein lies the problem.)

My goals for the rest of the semester is to spend more time painting, to finish the 3 paintings that are on the wall (which actually I'm not that worried about, I think I can manage that in the time I've got. Also figure out how to display them (which may be more problematic, in terms of actually building the scroll or the frame or whatever I intend to do.) I'll have to really push myself to do that.

I'd also like to produce more studies, and probably more digital studies, in the upcoming next few weeks. I'm currently overflowing with ideas of things to do for studies and I need to get some of those out on paper.

And, of course, there will be more ink things. Because i really really really really really am enjoying those ink drawings.