After completing my website, my mentor felt that my current work still had a long way to go. She felt that there wasn’t any point in pushing my current work until it was developed a little further (I had only recently started to develop a new series of works and it was very much in it’s formative stage). My mentor set me a task to produce 20 new paintings in 3 months. Producing that amount work was a tall order for me. She didn’t care what I chose to do, and whether the work was just sketches or fully resolved paintings. I could work in any medium. The challenge was to produce 20 works.
My work can be time consuming, and a task that focussed on quantity above everything was something I had not considered previously. I also felt that maybe my mentor was testing me to see how committed I was to my practice with all my other commitments, such as PAPER, my writing/research, and my teaching. Therefore, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to argue at this stage and I actually relished the challenge of having a new body of work. My mentor suggested that each new work should surprise me; offering something new that I haven’t done before.
