Telling a story

Recognising the time it is taking me to progress each exercise whilst allowing for drying time and reflection , I have experimented with progressing several pieces together. This exercise and the final assignment 3 work were therefore commenced at the same time as working on the "figure in an interior" exercise.

With the 2012 Olympics in the UK this year, I was inspired by the many images of the athletes across all forms of media. The individual stories of these people who had committed themselves to years of training became exposed as they competed in their chosen events. Although my daughter was not participating in the Olympics she is a judo coach and received funding from LOCOG for coaching certification as part of the legacy arrangements so she could continue to help local people develop their own skills. With this family connection, I felt for the participating athletes as their emotional highs and lows were laid bare for all to see.

For this exercise I gathered images seeking out strong emotional stories as well as interesting images. I quickly focused onto the stories of Mo Farah and the graphic images in the press as he reached the final metres of his battle for gold.

I am interested in capturing movement in its many forms and decided to experiment with telling the story of the final stages of Mo Farah's race. Mo was very expressive with changing gestures as he took gold whilst his opponents challenged for silver and bronze positions.

I created a composition by building images inspired by press photos taken in the Olympic stadium with 80,000 spectators. I wanted to show Mo's changing emotions which I decided to illustrate by including 3 phases of Mo within my group of figures. After roughly sketching out a composition I moved straight onto a prepared acrylic paper support marking out the respective positions of the group of runners with a burnt umber hue which I watered down as the individual figures disappeared into the distance. As the paint dried I was quite pleased with the monochrome image and was tempted to stop there.

I quickly discovered that working on a group of figures in motion was fun and I was more motivated to complete this exercise than the "figure in an interior". However, due to the smaller scale of this work overall and particularly the individual elements, I was drawn to using finer brushes and more compressed mark making. When stepping back for reflection and checking the overall composition these small marks became lost in the automatic blending of marks and hues within my eyes. I also decided that the group of 5 figures I had started with didn't create the atmosphere of the race I wanted.

I, therefore, modified the composition by indicating more figures in the background of the group. To achieve a feeling of space, depth and the capacity of the stadium, I kept the background to cooler colours and very limited detail.

I was very pleased with the outcome of this exercise. This was reinforced when my son on seeing the picture wanted to point out where he had sat in the stadium demonstrating I had achieved a feeling of being there. What I would try and do differently next time is avoid putting detail onto faces when working at this scale and focus more on the relative proportions of the figures; I appear to have created a taller version of Mo Farah in the distant figure for example. Also the coloured version of my composition does not have as much depth in the group of figures as I created in the initial monochrome draft.