2018
(Pictures Below)

                                                                                           The light table - Ella Stanford
 

 

This artwork is the embodiment of a semester long struggle to coherently explain my concepts, ways of thinking, and overall general approach to creation and learning.I believe the subconscious is one of the most powerful and pure things about being human, lying somewhere between the conscious and unconscious, acting as an alternate store house of information, emotional experiences and major premise.

 

I spent the first semester creating a twelve-page hand illustrated comic with a somewhat clear view of how I wanted everything to look. I found it to be quite mentally tolling as I’m very particular with every aspect of the given, and often use subconscious illustration as a means to deeper understand my emotions and reasoning behind my conscious motives. It is extremely important to me that I take this approach when creating as I feel it is the purest form of emotional conversion, and to me art without emotion is an unstimulating experience that hollows.

 

When the second semester came around I decided to focus solely on painting, to give myself a break from the unavoidable meticulous nature I have when drawing. My approach to painting is entirely subconscious and free from any predeterminations. I started by mindlessly applying big blocks of colour to a massive wooden board, I had no direction when I started this painting, although i noticed it made me more aware of graffiti colour blocking on the streets and the different colour choices placed upon individual structures and the way they contrasted each other within the city to create one big physical blocked picture. 

 

The first time I showed my painting and tried to explain my approach I was met with the excruciatingly unavoidable and inevitable human need to find or give meaning to something. I was unable to offer that information as I myself didn’t yet know the entirety of what the unfinished painting was or what it was to become. I tried to explain that I was taking an entirely subconscious approach to the painting but was met with suggestions that always had the basis of following some kind of rule or written action. I found myself feeling quite misunderstood and frustrated as these suggestions were entirely contradictory to everything I was trying to do, but in term they were just suggestions, so I listened and started my next painting as a sort of side project and a means to refresh.

 

I set myself the task of applying pinks in the middle of a canvas and slowing adding different shades to the pink, growing outwards creating a spread of smaller block colours. Essentially, I just created a more refined version of my larger painting. Although I find the outcome of the painting visually pleasing I was more interested in the piece of card I had used as my pallet and not the actual painting itself. The overall process of the painting for me was quite boring as my brain would always slip into a pattern of conscious thinking and I would disconnect with the painting. Finding the motivation to finish it was hard as it’s usually something I find therapeutic and freeing, whereas this painting was the polar opposite and tainted with the over analyzation of my everyday problems. When I did finally complete the painting, I was so frustrated with the bounding nature of what I had just put myself through, I went on something that can only be described as a full manic spree. 

I started looking into the fluidity of paint, mixing acrylic and watercolour with different amounts of water to see how the paints interacted with each other when they fell and how they looked when they dried. I was interested to see how the paints would dry on different surfaces but pushed this aside as I was still working on my first big painting and trying so hard to find a meaning for it.

 

I started to analyse my choice of colours and looked into colour therapy and colour psychology. I quickly lost interest in this subject when I realised that the meanings and associations given to colour are quite subjective and often stem from the natural forms in which these colours take shape in, and our preference towards certain colours usually comes from the first impressions we have of them.

 

 I decided to move on and look into the different light waves that colour carries, both on and off the visible spectrum. I started by looking into the influence that artificial light has on the human eye due to previous subjections of the day, such as spending long hours on the computer or under L.E.D. lights, as this can desynchronise our circadian rhythm and lead to changes in mood, behaviour, hormone release, and sleep. I started to briefly look into this topic but found myself diving into deeper rabbit holes of information such as ophthalmology, ultra- violet, the evolution of vision, different energies of colour, cytogenics and so much more, I found everything so interesting and tried my hardest to try relate it to my painting but when it came down to it, I again, had trouble explaining the links between my painting and research.

 

I felt like a phony as I had only really skimmed the top of each topic and to be frank what I was saying all sounded like bullshit, because it was. Again I had tried to change my style of learning to one that just was not fitting to how I create, although I loved learning the sciences and psychologies of it all by sitting down and teaching myself I’ve realised that it just takes me a lot longer than the average person due to having Post Concussional Syndrome and no matter how hard I tried my painting was never going to be what I was trying to say it was, and I didn’t feel right trying to make it. So instead of half-heartedly trying to finish the painting and in time create hatred for it, I decided to stop the painting completely and take a more hands on approach to see if I could really wrap my brain around light waves and colour. 

 

I brought a half-broken glass table into the studio that my flat mates and I had found one night in town outside a restaurant and sanded the edges to make the glass easily transportable. I drove out to Houghton bay and collected three bits of drift wood in which I balanced the glass on. I was thinking that I would pour different coloured paint onto the glass and be able to get an indication of the different energy levels the colours held from the reflections the they had on the floor from the passing of natural light through the glass, but when it came down to it I was painting at night time.

 

So I decided to change my approach and posed the question “how much would the L.E.D lights affect my thoughts and overall experience with the painting during and after, and compare those to my thoughts the next day when I view it in natural light”.

 

I will disclaim the overall effect of this experiment was heightened due to excruciating amounts of stress I was being placed under by goings on in my personal life and the excessive amounts of caffeine I was drinking at ungodly hours.

 

I started by mixing acrylic, water colour and oil paint with different amounts of linseed oil, water and bubble mixture. I then poured the different mixtures on the middle of the glass from my height. This created splattering that spread beyond the table and over the floor, I realised this probably wasn’t a good idea as there were other artworks on the walls of my studio so I changed my approach to a more lower, softer pour. Starting at the top I watched the natural flow of the different paints blend, wash and separate from one another. The paint ran downwards towards the floor at the two lowest points of the painting due to a slight indifference with how the glass sat on top of the pieces of drift wood.  I had no colour preference in mind when creating this painting but looking back on it I can see that my choices were largely influenced by what my brain found easiest to process under the L.E.D lighting. I was so exhausted by the end of this painting that all I could muster up in response to it was a “?”. Everywhere I looked I couldn’t get away from the reflection of the L.E.D lights as they would either bounce off the paint or reflect from the glass. I just sat there in an illumination of L.E.D staring at what I’d done quite vacantly, I couldn’t get a proper grasp of the colours I had chosen and took to taking flash photos on my phone to reference, although this was just another form of blue light, at this point I was mentally and physically exhausted but my brain was still wired from the interference the fluorescence was having on my bodies biological clock. My eye lids became so heavy, they stayed at a consistently flat level, my eyes were so strained they felt like they were burning. I had to take a few breaks in the bathroom and found myself just sitting there because it was dimmer than the rest of the building. At the time I was still trying to get an illustration finished for my elective so when I was done with The Light Table I went in search for a place to settle down, the outcome of this was everything but settling, the L.E.D had put so much strain on my retina that I physically could not look at the lights, I was walking around the university shielding my eyes at night.

Exposure to blue light causes melatonin to be suppressed more than any other kind of light, I had messed my body’s natural sleep rhythm up so badly that my insomnia came back (also due to stress), My overall mental awareness depleted and my body went into overdrive. I was constantly shaking and felt like this was amplified to match the flickering of the fluorescence. I’m not going to lie it was a pretty horrendous last stretch from Sunday to Thursday, I was sleep deprived which impacted me greatly, I couldn’t remember doing things, couldn’t pay attention or coherently put together sentences, it was the first time I’ve ever lost all contact with my physical body. I had no concept of time and everything went so slowly because my brain just couldn’t keep up.

 

When I look at this table in natural light I get an over whelming sense of mental clarity and ease. To me this table is a metaphor for my whole year, in the end I put trust in myself and stayed true to what matters most to be as I discover who I am as a person and as an artist. The natural flow of this object is my very own meteorological phenomenon. It is my minds rendition of reflection, refraction and dispersion. This table my light at the end of the darkest tunnel I’ve ever been through.