Painting 1 (UPM); Part 3; Exercise 1

WHAT?

The brief was to paint 20 self-portraits, using ink, not more than 1 minute per painting.

SO WHAT?

I worked in Indian ink using a long-handled soft round brush (size 4), fitting two paintings onto a sheet of cartridge paper (so each being A5 – roughly the size of my glass plate for monoprinting). In the first two paintings the timer didn’t work so they are slightly over a minute; after that I stayed strictly to time. I varied the lighting (both level and direction), the position of the mirror, my facial expressions, and the painting hand, and therefore accuracy (depending on which hand was holding the mirror).

I found the exercise very challenging and tied myself in knots rather – by the time I’d got in position, set the timer, looked, got my brush loaded and made a mark I was already halfway through my time! I ended up trying to pick out one or two features, mainly the darkest ones, and tried to get those down.

NOW WHAT?

To be honest, my main takeaway from this exercise would be to organise myself better physically for a process so time-dependent and containing so many elements which needed to be in the right place to work effectively and never were – there was just too much arm-crossing, reaching, panicking, losing my place, and the long handled brush was a serious mistake, it was in the way of everything.