Project 1 - Experimenting with Expressive Lines and Marks

We had to produce four sheets  divided into four, 1 each for four emotions. We were given Anger, Calm, Joy and to choose another. I chose sadness

I found this quite difficult. I lost my husband last year to Cancer, quite horribly and quite quickly and so Joy was pretty hard to find and Anger was difficult. However, here are the results.

Anger: Black seemed the only colour to use for this, dark, spiky and wild mark making. I've never done anything like this before and so I had some inhibitions really, strange because there was only me there. I felt the marks were crude, but then so are bare emotions

Joy.  This was as close to red as I had. Maybe red is angry, but I felt it was more joyous and exuberant. The marks are exploding, like fireworks, or at least those are the images I had in my head at the time.

Calm. This had to be blue, and the marks are reminiscent of calm waves, or at least that's what I think. It did calm me down a bit actually doing this, although I did leave a gap between each one.

Sadness. Easy to conjure up this one. Blue (the blues), heavy and weighing down one's self and soul.
Not a fun one to do by any means as I dredged up some pretty heavy emotions.

Sadness in closeup, misty, heavy, wet

Calm in closeup. Waves, gentle blue, lulling

Joy in closeup. Exuberant, bursting out

Anger in closeup. Heavy, black, jagged, destructive.

In retrospect I think I should've used red for the anger, although whilst I was doing these I felt black was more appropriate. The anger I was feeling was very dark, targeted towards my husband's death and all that surrounded it. I felt I was in a dark place, funereal and angry at certain individuals, the world, etc.