Lee's Artwork

Lee has been spending the last three years working towards a degree in creative technologies, majoring in visual arts. She finishes this year and is currently in the final few weeks of her big end-of-year exhibition. She's a painter focusing on processing painting. You can read more about it on her blog http://paintingcollaboration.blogspot.com/

This afternoon I met her at uni to photograph her work. I've been keeping up with her blog and admiring the photos of her work she's put up. I've been wanting to put my macro lens to work on her artwork, making her artwork part of my artwork.

I used the macro lens to focus up close on the patterns made by the spilt paint. Lee uses the spilt paint skins in other works. I found the patterns beautiful!

The first layer of paint has cracked, forming valleys for the varnish.

This is wet paint.

Varnish bubbles have dried in the work.

More cracked paint

This part looks like the paint and varnish were poured together and the varnish has sealed in the wet paint. I have no idea how Lee did this actually.

More cracked paint and varnish bubbles.

I loved the little varnish bubbles!

I liked the paint crack that the varnish had filled.

More paint and varnish mixes.

These are more macro shots of the dried paint skins that Lee has used to make their own artwork.

Lee uses both paint and varnish skins.

I liked the way the light bounced off the varnish skins.

I used Lee's engagement ring to show scale. But they also made for fun and interesting backgrounds for the ring. Anyone can shoot their ring on a flower, but how many people use art and paint skins to showcase their ring?!

While Lee works on her computer I took some not-so-macro shots to show the works in actual size. Although, it's hard to really get a good idea of how big the works are without standing beside them yourself.

The piece that she introduced to me as "Big Woody".

Paint cracks and varnish.

This (and the one below) is work in progress. While I was there Lee poured on another layer of varnish. We discovered that the room must have a slight tilt in one direction because the varnish all ran off to the right. It was also really interesting to watch the varnish spread over time. It started off as a star pattern and spread out into a more circular pattern.

A work in progress. This is the wet paint I photographed earlier. Lee pours the paint into the frame and waits for it to dry. There is no canvas to speak of, the paint is it's own canvas. The spilt paint to the right is the paint skin that I was fascinated with. Lee is hoping to be able to peel the paint skin off with the finished product so that it can be part of the work. Fingers crossed!

More macro work of the paint skin.