Do I see then paint or see when I paint?
Does the painting replicate the seeing experience?
Does the painting need to be anchored in the seeing experience?
Just a few of the self directed questions from my mid-term tutorial review form (which we bring completed to the tutorials) The tutorial was a helpful conversation in the week following the Contextualisation Powerpoint presentations which prefigure the one we give in May, and only two weeks before our formative assessment.
Reflecting on my work is a strangely passive out of body process at the moment, one of watching myself at work, viewing all the activity as parts of one action. Each question progressing swiftly into the next and the next; no answer required. As part-time students we have been in this level since February, and there is for us a sense of preparing for what comes after the course. Our full time colleagues are preoccupied with their dissertations and by the amount of time taken away from studio practice, which they are all desperate to give themselves to. Our dissertations sit on the staff office shelf; marked but the grade not given until the final result. Our thoughts hover around what our practice means to us outside of the uni. I have just looked at the timetable and added up our official studio days; 44 remaining. Four years of tutorials and modules, crits and conversations, and still more boxes to be ticked. Yet when I walk away in June it will be me and my practice, how well do we know each other? How authentic is the relationship? There has been a shift. No longer what and why, but how?
