Been pretty busy again this last week. Painting yes, how did you guess. But also, I have at last worked out a system for posting updates more frequently on my phone.
I’m also investigating Twitter, yes Twitter. I’ve been ignoring it for forever, I do Facebook and have done for about 4 years now but haven’t really understood the advantage of Twitter over Facebook. Still don’t as yet. But, thanks to Richard’s invite, I now have a Twitter name “BeNice4” and will try and get my head around it this week during my commute time. Any tips will be most gratefully received, or should I say tweets??? Q: Can you update your blog via twitter? Is that a step too far? I guess thats the next logical stage, isn’t it? Maybe when I know more about it I’ll be able to answer that question myself. It does look like it could be a useful info bank.
Anyway, paintings. I had my second record week last week. Put in the hours mind you, but it paid off. Nice and refreshed from my holiday I guess. A couple of them were a bit daunting: “Kaysha’s” skin colour I was worried about and the fact her glasses split one of her eyes in two; “Roger’s” rimless glasses and I guess with him being that much older, then there was his moustache; “Tom’s” (we have two) moustache too, I’d applied the latex all wrong on this one and feared it would cause me some issues, it was at the wrong angle.
Our new timetable has been published on our college site and there’s a couple of tutorials coming up, it will be good to chat through my progress so far and discuss the idea I have for a sound piece to accompany the paintings…I will have to give this some more thought, not only the logistics of making it but also if indeed it would work in the space, there being fellow students work hung there along side it too.
Need to find time to update my website soon too. Can’t decide on whether to give it another total revamp/look or not. Guess the time I have to do it will ultimately determine this!
I’m getting kind of excited now but also a bit nervous, there’s so much more to do than just making the physical work for the show, so much more behind the scenes stuff – documentation etc… that needs doing and I have barely enough time for the painting let alone everything else. I’m more often than not in the studio 10/11 hours a day, Mon-Fri, thats without taking into account the commuting time either side. So weekends are the only time I have for, lets call it the admin side of things!
Need to make a list and prioritise!
Decided to take a short break – a few days in Cornwall. Partly because I’ve been working hard and needed a break, and partly enforced as the college was closed over the easter bank holidays and rail strikes were threatened.
Had a great time, lovely weather – sunny and warm mixed with cold, wet and windy. Just what I needed. So back to college tomorrow, one more week of holidays before term starts back, and 3 more weeks after that till we have to be finished our degree show work….
It’s pretty exciting and daunting too.
There’s so much to think about! I still don’t know right now what the answer is to the selling/pricing question. I wonder, though I suspect not, whether we’ll get much advice on this when term starts. I mean there may be some guidelines, but ultimately its you the artist who needs to make the call. And this is a new phase to my practice that I am totally naive about. I guess everyone makes mistakes initially so I shouldn’t worry, just relax and see make a call nearer the time.
Back to my paintings though, when it came to paint on the purple grounds – “Pheobe” and “Alex” (see next post) – I had loads of issues. More so with “Alex” though, he has caused me the most trouble to date. Firstly the purple is such that the complexion, no matter what I do gives a stoney-cold look because of the purple shining through my paint – it’s quite fascinating really. Secondly I just really messed up and had the proportions all wrong – eyes too close, nose too short etc.. so at one point I rubbed half of it off and started again. Got there in the end though.
Must have been tired, I guess.
As time moves on and my piece grows, the inevitable conversation comes up over and over – am I going to sell the individual portraits at the degree show? What a great idea I’ve had, I’ll make a killing, earn loads of cash. Obviously insinuating that this is what I’d planned from the start. Hmm… When some fellow students first said this I was quite shocked. Not at the fact of the matter, more that it was really the farthest thing from my mind. Sure all work is potentially for sale at these shows, but I hadn’t really thought that my peers or their families might want to buy their portrait … as they are suggesting. Naïve? Probably. But of course there’s an obvious dilemma here. I see the piece as a whole. I don’t see each portrait as an individual piece of work and in fact feel that, looked at in isolation; they don’t have the same power as I hope/intend that they have when they’re all together. The thing is: if I refuse to sell an individual painting to eager parents/partners or the buying public at large, am I declaring that they are not worthy, are they not my intended audience…. and equally if I choose this route and sell say 1, 2, 10, 20 pieces, where does it leave the remainder? The piece is no longer whole; it can no longer work as it was originally intended. I don’t know about you, but this is going to really be my first foray into selling my work. Equally this is my degree show work, a seminal piece on which to hopefully launch my artistic career. I don’t want to get it wrong. This has to be carefully thought out. While I may not want to sell it in piece size chunks, the likelihood of selling it as a whole is pretty slim, isn’t it?! I don’t know. We may think, we’re artists, we should just create art as best we can and not go into the nasty buying and selling world that is the art market, but let’s be realistic here, we still have to eat! We still have to live.
What a rant! As you can tell I’ve been giving this some thought. It may just be irrelevant anyway, but it has to be considered in order to deal with any eventuality that may arise. Solutions to consider: (a) don’t sell (b) only sell as a whole piece (c) sell new commissions of individual portraits as required, so the original stays intact (d) sell individual portraits if interest is there and not worry about it (e) sell individual portraits and replace with a blank coloured square – the piece stays intact, albeit it morphs into a new state of being as it changes over time when/if parts are sold…..
One bad week followed by one great week. That’s the way it wants to be, but luckily enough that’s how it’s been.
Thanks for the comments David, Carolyn. Carolyn, Photoshop has been an invaluable slave, assisting me in planning and preparing what the whole piece is going to look like. That’s how I’m pretty clear in my mind what the end result is going to look like and why I’m so excited. Trying to convey this to my tutor on the other hand took some work, some printouts of my planning pieces etc. I’m pretty confident he gets it now as when it came to allocating degree show spaces I got the space I wanted as a result of my proposal submission, so all’s good there :O)
Interestingly we’re into Easter holidays now, the college is open as usual apart from the bank holidays, so getting access to the studios is easy, and amazingly there’s almost as many of us in now as there is in term time. All working on our degree show pieces, so a good encouraging atmosphere. Funny how it makes us start to realise that with only 7 weeks prep left, 5 now actually, that soon we’ll be without studio space. We’ll have to source our own spaces; we’ll all disperse and go our separate ways, quite sad really. We forget how lucky we are having space in the centre of London like this, and I’m only relieved I’ve been making full use of it, yet it also highlights more what I’ll be missing when its gone.
I keep getting asked why I’m painting on coloured squares. Fair question I guess. It all stemmed from an initial conversation with my tutor over the tone of my palette being very warm and that maybe I should consider using ‘cool’ grounds, help create more contrast. On this piece of work I couldn’t choose just one colour and thought about maybe three, but which three…. Then I got thinking about Chuck Close and how all his portraits start with coloured squares, that’s when it hit me; I’d build the portraits onto a random collection of coloured squares. So there you have it.
Having painted quite a few this week, I’m now in a good position to create an image for the degree show catalogue. I did consider submitting something completely different, but have settled for an excerpt from this piece. I’ll montage together some individual images into a partial grid like the one I’ve attached to my previous blog entry, but more realistic of the final piece. What I mean by that is, include some blank canvas squares. You see there are some peers who should be part of the piece, but for whom I don’t have a photo to work from. Either they’ve joined the cohort after 1st year or they weren’t in college that day in our 1st week of 1st year when the photos were taken. For these I am including a blank coloured square. I could have photographed them, but the time has passed, and the aesthetic would be totally different so I haven’t.
