Mon 18.03.2013

After some consideration I have decided to stay in Falmouth for the first week of the Easter holidays. I hope that the quiet of an empty flat will help me focus on my work and I want to continue to use the resources that we have here in terms of the library and printing/scanning; so that once I am home I will have gathered everything necessary to begin the next stage of my project. I was hoping to be further on by now and have moved past the research stage and so I am going to try and work at more of a pace during the next few days and try and be more focussed in what I look at. I have made a plan and  to do list in my ideas/notes book which I am going to try and follow.

Ruth Issett

Today I took some of the books which I had got out at Tremough up the silent study area in the library to do some reading and note taking. I began with one of two books which I had taken out about the artist Ruth Issett.  Issett is someone who I have studied in previous projects and for a long time I have been inspired by her beautiful use of colours and the subtle patterns which she achieves by over printing and ‘ghost printing’ with a variety of media. The first book which I looked at was called ‘Colour on Paper and Fabric’. Ruth Issett works across both these mediums and I thought that this in itself may be interesting in relation to my own practice because I am thinking that I would like to feed in the skills I have gained in the past, working on fabric, into more two dimensional paper work. 

Ruth Issett

The focus of this book is also colour. I feel that although I have moved forward in my understanding of the subtleties of different colours, I can still sometimes find myself in a rut of using a rather similar overall palate that I am comfortable working with. I am often afraid to pair a colour with its opposite commentary counter-part and so go for harmonious tones instead. Using opposite colours is something which Issett does really well and this book gave me ideas for some exciting combinations. Issett talks about subtle colour mixing of opposite colours – eg. cerise red and golden yellow to produce ‘burnt orange, ginger or caramel’. The books also explains about the importance of mixing dark into light and how using a small amount of black or brown can tone down gaudy colours. It was useful to read about colour theory, but in relation to its practicalities and particular work with a range of illustrations to look at because sometimes I find the science of colour theory a little confusing.

I photocopied relevant pages of the book and am going to put these into a research folder so that when my work is marked it is possible to see what I have read. Also, because I am dyslexic I find it easier to take things in when I underline and annotate text and the approach allows me to do this freely.