New website!
This is a picture of a bunch of wet tires. Look at all the different patterns! Visit my new website: http://www.matthisgrunsky.ca
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Here are a few photos from my graduation show a few weeks ago. I haven’t graduated yet, but each undergrad in their fourth year gets one show and mine was scheduled early in the semester. There were five paintings in total, two of which were white 8’x 6′ canvases and three that were 5’x 5′. Each painting is a conglomeration of a series of patterns of chewing gum that have been spit on the sidewalk. The goal of the project was to create a formula which when completed would produce interesting formal compositions without any decision making on the part of the artist. This kind of process is common within the practice of conceptual art, but the fact that I included such seductive, traditionally oriented objects in the show distanced this work from the anti aesthetic sentiments of most conceptual artists. (You can read about this here and here)
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Cambridge Battery
7″x 7″ Compressed charcoal and gesso on plywood
I made some art! It’s been long enough. This was on a hot sunny morning while everyone and their dog was out walking each other. I like how the active sky dominates the foreground and draws your eye away form the subject of the drawing. Guess what the best tool is for applying paint like this. My finger!
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Tags: Cambridge Battery, Charcoal, Finger Painting, Landscape, Point Pleasant Park, Sketch
Canada by Weather
4’x 5′ Acrylic and charcoal on unprimed, unstretched canvas.
What is Canada but a giant weather forecast?
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Tags: Acrylic, Art, Drawing, Large Painting, Map, Painting, School
Below a Helicopter
Here is the second of three final paintings for this semester. This one changed a lot from start to finish and was met with a lot of interesting criticism along the way. I think a painting like this immediately appears to be unfinished because of its lack of colour, especially when parts of it like the helicopter could easily be green, yellow or red. The combination of the semi abstracted landscape and the fairly realistic helicopter is something that I have never really done before and I think I like how it turned out. I feel like it provides enough content to direct the viewers thoughts in a certain direction, but leaves room for the mind to wander. In any case, it was an easy palette to manage.
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Tags: Acrylic, Art, Black and White, Helicopter, Landscape, Painting, School
Circles and Horizons
Oil and acrylic on canvas 4’3″x 4’3″
This was a mid term project that I never uploaded because I didn’t really like it. I still don’t like it much but I’m going to roll it up soon so I thought I would at least put it up here. It is supposed to be a response to a book that had an impression on me as a child, but I have never been one for interpretive work and I don’t think it is very successful. The most interesting part for me is the raw canvas border around the edge that sort of makes it look like it is a stretched animal skin or something.
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Tags: Abstract, Art, Colour, Landscape, Oil Paint, Painting, School
1/3 Final Paintings
8’x 6′ Acrylic on canvas
The arrangement of dots here is taken from photos of gum on the sidewalk outside a local bar. I used information from four adjacent blocks of sidewalk and gridded them onto the painting one by one using black paint. In between blocks I lay down a coat of thinned white paint so that the finished painting would have a variety of shades of grey. The size of the canvas was determined by the proportions of the four blocks that I was working from.
Here are a few of the blocks.
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Tags: Abstract, Art, Black and White, Large Painting, Painting, School, Sidewalk
Three Stages of a Sketch
Compressed charcoal on paper. ~ 8″x10″
This is a studying face. People hold very still when they concentrate. The chin and neck of this drawing are a little squeezed but aside from that I think it’s pretty successful. It’s been a while since I tried my hand at a portrait.
It’s fun playing spot the differences in the top two.
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Tags: Art, Charcoal, Drawing, Portraiture, Scraps, Sketch
Helicopters!
Some preparatory sketches for an upcoming painting. I’m not sure what kind of decisions I’m going to make colour wise on this one. It might end up very colourful, or just tonal like these drawings.
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Tags: Art, Charcoal, Drawing, Helicopter, Scraps, Sketch, Study
A White Bird
I am currently working on an independent study that in which I am making a bunch of these wooden birds. They are made out of two pieces of pine and are carved, sliced and then folded. The idea to work with them came to me as I was reading an essay by John Berger which talks about how through this type of simple formulaic construction, elements of aesthetic beauty can be uncovered. What I am going to do with these birds is currently undisclosed, but when I finish the sculpture I will post the results.
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Tags: Art, Fan Bird, John Berger, Pigeon, School, Sculpture, The White Bird
Street Pigeons
4′ x5′ Oil on canvas
How and why do pigeons live in manufactured environments?
What parallels are there between humans and pigeons?
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Tags: Abstract, Art, Colour, Large Painting, Oil Paint, Painting, Pigeon, School, Street Paint, Urban Environment
Killam Library from Memory
Lots of purple in this one. I’ve been getting mixed results about the green circle and the white dots on the side but the whole painting seems to hold together better than my previous one.
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Tags: Art, Dalhousie, Killam Library, Landscape, Oil Paint, Painting, School, Urban Sketching
Concrete Backdoor with Overhang
Back into large paintings again this semester. This one is 5’x6′. I have been experimenting with painting with a small foam paint roller. It works pretty well and its useful because I can layer thin coats of paint, but it also leaves strange patterns and a rippled effect. Sometimes it works out, but most of the time it creates a lot of unnecessary visual stimulation. This set of stairs can be found at the back of a building on the Dalhousie campus. I think I chose it because it was so boring and still.
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Tags: Art, Colour, Large Painting, Oil Paint, Painting, School, Urban Sketching
Still Life with Spiral Pattern
Here is my latest foray into glazing. I thought it might be interesting to work on something small and detailed after a semester of rather large and loose work. The decision to take pictures after every session of painting came because this style of painting lends itself to process and I thought it would be interesting to see some sort of progression. This painting took about two weeks to complete and each picture was taken after one or two hours of work. I like the final painting, but it began to deviate from local colour a little bit at the end in aid of it being a painting.
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Tags: Art, Colour, Glazing, Oil Paint, Painting, Pattern, Step by Step, Still Life
This was the second component to my final project for painting. The assignment was to cover a variety of familiar objects with patterned cloth that might conceal their identity, and then paint them. My objects were a big greek pot that I threw last year in throwing class, a stapler and a hammer. There are a bunch of unresolved areas, but I like most of what is happening. It was a pain in the ass having to mix so much canvas colour. I should have used some different fabrics.
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Tags: Art, Oil Paint, Painting, Pattern, School, Still Life, Tools
Grunskm 