BFA - Bachelor of Fine Art Degree

The Travelling Painting is about the process of painting and the tension created between the different materials in the work.

I use hessian, an old historical material. I like the unevenness and the feeling of the raw organic fibres. I even like the special smell, giving me associations to my childhood - coming in from the cold to a warm house plastered with hessian.

I place the hession on the floor on top of my used plastic drop sheets and it creates a tension right away - a tension between old and new materials. When I pour acrylic paint and medium onto the hessian the tension becomes even more apparent and almost visible, like the hessian is rejecting the paint, separating like oil and water. It feels like the materials are so far apart historically that they just will not amalgamate. When the paint and medium dries I can peel off the hessian from the drop-sheet and during the drying process the paint and medium picks up old paint from the drop-sheet and transfer it to the hessian.

So I am painting in reverse, first of all because the paint drops are being transferred to the back of the hessian, so the back then becomes the front and because paint from my drop-sheets become something valuable and the main focus of my work instead of being unvalued and disposable. This is what I call self-appropriation by coincidence, as the old paint shows remnants of earlier work done over the last four years of study.

The endless process of painting is like a game that never ends. If the game ended there would be no reason for me to paint anymore, so I create a virtual world that I can enter, like a computer game, where the possibilities are endless and therefore the process of painting becomes never-ending. In this virtual world, I see the tension between the different materials I use as yet another layer in this simulated reality. I can immerse myself in the process and these layers and not worry about producing an end-result or a product as I have found that painting is not a product in itself - it is a continuing process of creative thoughts and intuition that I can keep exploring in pure self-indulgence.

Gitte Steen Andersen, 2007