At the beginning of this year, I enrolled at North Island College to complete my studies of the Fine Arts Diploma program that is offered through the Comox Valley Campus on Vancouver Island, BC. As part of our learning process, our instructors have encouraged us to share our process online. Made available to us was the option of creating a blog through the platform Wordpress however I was blessed to receive permission from my instructors to utilize my own personal blog in order to share my process and work instead. As such, this blog post is a gathering of the work accomplished while enrolled in the Fin 121 Colour Theory course. All my painting student work, assignments, research, creative process and development are shared here for you to explore!
UNIT ONE:
Self Portrait Using Earth and Flesh Tones
A Reflection Of Unit 1
For unit one, most of my time and attention went into making this self portrait. It happened very organically and was a recreation of a greyscale I made last semester. This time earth tones and flesh tones were utilized in making the work.It is far from perfect but I do feel like this iteration of my the image is much more successful than it was last semester. In retrospect, maybe its my most successful piece of the whole semester. It took me a long time, indeed, the whole course actually. I also confess, I found out about oil sticks and experimented a little bit on this piece as well. I found that the oil sticks were so much more rich and vibrant than the acrylic. I tried to just experiment a little, as to not take me away from what the parameters were of the initial project. Originally I had started to paint a different self-portrait but after a talk with my professor about being able to utilize previous work from other semesters, this piece opened up to me very easily and came about very much with me following my intuition. It was easier to remake that pervious image than to start from scratch; sometimes it pays not to reinvent the wheel.
Unit Two:
Reflections On Unit 2
I feel like I failed this unit, in terms of how I executed it, but I feel like I learned so much while going about to complete all the exercises we were requested to do. In particular, for me, I learned so much about creating transparency with acrylic paints. For my first piece I used acrylic matte medium but after running out I had to pivot (as I was unable to buy more of that product) and turned to using Modgepodge as an emergency alternative (it didn’t work as well but it did work).
Unit Three:
An Introduction to The Single Chair, Unit 3 Final Project
A chair. A seat. A resting place. A cultural artifact. A place and object. A place of elevation. A throne or death chair. A seat at the table. A chair, with great simplicity, is many things; to me a chair is a blue painting where an idea of loneliness rests like a growing pearl in my mind. My grandfather was always fond of doors. In his house he had many paintings of doors. My mother was always very fond of floral paintings. For me, though the true reasons are beyond articulation, perhaps because it is rooted deep within my subconscious, I have my affection and infinity for painted chairs.
A Written Description of The Single Chair (Final Project)
The Single Chair is a twenty-four inch by thirty-six inch acrylic painted canvas depicting the image of a single blue chair in an indoor setting, such as a house or office, produced in 2026 by Spencer Sheehan-Kalina for his final project of the Fine Arts Diploma program at North Island College.
An Analysis Colour Scheme in The Single Chair
When I had the initial idea for the piece start form in my mind I was certain of a few details that I knew I needed: a single chair that was blue. There were a few underlying currents of inspiration for the imputes (for example, I would refer to the work I made for the previous painting class, recorded here in an earlier blog post, as one touch point). Blue is restful, peaceful, it is a blanket to pull over sadness and sometimes it is made out of sadness, blue nourishes us and we come from blue, we sleep in blue and we dream in blue. Blue is the anchoring point from which the red and yellow forces of chaos in the universe throw their wild creations into existence. Blue is where I was sitting in, where I had walked from and the only thing I could see in front of me personally and creatively: for these reasons I knew my chair needed to be blue.
My challenge came from deciding what the blue of my chair was to exist alongside. The idea of blue was my foundation but the colour scheme fell into place when I decided on an analogues colour scheme. An analogues colour scheme fit the natural scene I was attempting to paint but it also offered something that felt conceptually firm and necessary: in utilizing the yellow and orange in the painting, the blue of the chair was emphasized.
Through my colour scheme I was able to add focus to the subject of the blue chair and all the psychic work it does as an image and concept.
A Reflection After The Work Is Made
Is a work every really made? How do you know when it is time to walk away and when it is time to continue pushing through? This piece of artwork has been made but I feel like it is far from finished. There’s so much work I would like to do on it still. I learned lots. I learned enough that if I I had the time I would repaint the whole piece all over again. I want to start all over and try again not because this piece doesn’t work, per say, but because I feel so drawn to the idea of painting a single blue chair; I haven’t really executed my vision, just a strong step toward manifesting it.
Time is a constraint that often determines when a piece is over: so that occurred here (of course there’s always opportunity to go back into a piece and to try again but so too is there the opportunity to start all over again as well, just try painting another chair). Despite all the time restrictions I did utilize many different painting techniques in the creation of these piece, for example, the use of an underpainting, choosing to blend right on the canvas, the use of pointillism to help capture texture in the carpet flooring represented in the image, multiple white washes were employed and sgraffito to help represent and capture the texture present in the wall of this image.
For me the chair is about arriving and leaving, about having a seat and giving a seat up, about all the emotions that go into navigating that dance. I am proud for this chair does say exactly what I wanted to say. Maybe not how I wanted to say it, so much less skilled than I’d like to be, but it is what I wanted to say and I do think that’s a kind of victory in and of itself.
A Reflection After Critique
I missed critique. I was stuck in Nanaimo, moving away from the Comox Valley. It would have been my last critique of my Diploma. The last time we would have sat in circle with my peers, my fellow students, my community of artists that I have been a part of for such a long and significant part of my life. The last time we would have all discussed our own work, given different ideas, seen opportunities, celebrated victories on the canvas. There is only silence and my last piece of work for my diploma now exists in the vacuum of space where things are but unknown, exist but unseen. In many way, it is appropriate: North Island College closes the Fine Arts Diploma Program after so many successful years and no one will remember all the little details of that place that made it so special, so nurturing, so rewarding to inhabit. I missed to the opportunity to see the work done by the other students, that’s disappointing and hard— what a special honour it is an an art student to be able to view another artists work and creative process in development.
I wonder what my comments would have been? Perspective. Always perspective. I can never get it right when I just do something straight from hand. On one hand, I enjoy that: it’s my embrace of imperfection from my eye to my hand and in doing so a big fuck you to the rules and expectations of needing to be perfect (it's expressive, confrontational and bold), on the other hand it leaves me feeling vulnerable, unskilled and open to dismissal. It is a valid comment and one that I’d expect and welcome. It is one I am aware of and choose not to resolve in this piece but do think I could hold on to and apply to another piece in the future. There would have been kind and generous comments too, none which come to me but that the idea of makes me smile. That is one thing about critique, someone always being able and willing to find something nice to say about your work, no matter how difficult your own feelings may be to your own work.
I end the course and my program with an empty blue chair. A seat occupied and given up. A seat waiting to be filled. A seat haunted by ghosts and open to the potential of that still yet come. At this point, I don’t know if I am the one coming to sit on the blue chair or if I am walking away from it but I do know that whichever I am, I am grateful to be here at all, still, still learning, still full of hope for what’s to come and full of sadness for what’s gone.
Creative Process Work
