The nitty gritty of day two:
- The repainting of my wall was completed, also further coats to other walls all around, the whole room began to look much better for this important and time-consuming preparation.
- The selection of the paintings had to be made, so the paintings envisaged were taken out of their packaging and placed along the wall
- This was the first time I had seen the paintings in a row, and it took a while to adjust to that because until then, I had related to each painting as an individual. But the paintings were all produced over the same arc of time and by the same methodology, so they also have a continuous relationship with each other. Their common denominator is me, their maker – I had not seen/understood them in this way before.
- I had to arrive at a visual arrangement for the paintings which seemed most coherent in the space that they were being placed in. It took some time to consider and I kept rearranging the row but eventually I decided on a particular sequence (will put up images later) as much in consideration of the nature of the wall itself, as for the visual aesthetics of the paintings. I also had to take into account the accompanying videos, between which there is considerable variety. All these components/elements had to be balanced.
- Next, the hanging height for the painting had to be decided and my eye level with the centre of the painting seemed the obvious way ahead. If I were a very short or tall person that would have to be taken into account, as the hanging height has the audience in mind.
- Next decision regarding how the paintings were to be aligned – in a single row they need to be all level with the top of each or all level with the bottom of each or the centre of each. Obviously other arrangements would have been possible but anything else would have had to be part of the artistic concept from the outset for it to have been appropriate. The alignment was decided on as the height of one of the paintings was 2cm less that all the others; centre aligning them all made that apparent inconsistency practically invisible. The disparity in height was not an artistic discrepancy, didn’t matter – it had simply occurred in the making of the painting as I had reorientated it as I had worked it and arrived at a preferred orientation which I have been using in images of it – so it was not the case to reorientate the finished painting (which would have been the easiest solution).
- Next step, decide on how far apart the paintings should be – this done just by eye, so takes a while to get it right.
- Next, measure to calculate and pencil mark the exact placement of the central painting (not the one at either end)
- Each painting rests on an invisible ledge along its lower edge, so the placement of this ledge must be accurate, so spirit level is used and the ledge if fixed to the wall exactly where it should be.
- Next, the painting (with its specially designed mirror plates fixed to the back using a velcro system) is held against the wall, resting on the ledge already fixed to the wall and micro adjustments are made before finally screwing the mirror plates into the wall.
- The subsequent paintings are then fixed in the same manner working out from the central work until all five works are hung
- The paintings were all hung by the afternoon of the next day, day three.