Waiting for the winds of 70mph ripping through Scotland to drop off before I go over to Delta Studios with work for the Forth Valley Open Studios exhibition.
(http://www.forthvalleyopenstudios.com/)
I am submitting an installation called “Mobile Art” of an 100 images are all created either on on my iphone or ipad .
Last year I sold my iphone images for £5 each.
They proved to be very popular but they were certainly not cost effective considering the work that went into them for they were individually printed and mounted on foam board.
Also I was very uneasy with this arrangement then for I seemed to be trying to stay with one foot in the traditional print world and the other in the digital.
And succeeding in neither.
So this year I have freed myself from the tyranny of trying to produce conventional art for sale and I am giving the images away for free – in digital form sent either to peoples mobiles or computers.
I feel a lot happier with this arrangement since the images were designed on an electronic device and should be viewed on one.
David Hockney recent exhibition in Paris abandoned canvas altogether and he showed work created and shown entirely on electronic devices. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11666162
No sign of winds dropping so will video the storm instead and go to Delta Studios tomorrow.
Time of our Lives…challenging perceptions of older people
We were just about to start filming the soft rock group Steamer Lane on Saturday in the middle of Stirling when they started: the South American pan pipers with all their amplifiers going full blast.
Try competing against that!
I had this tremendous sense of deja- vu. Ten years ago in my Degree show at Glasgow School of Art I had installed a sound installation “Duet” of birds singing and a cat purring. It was a lyrical piece and it was set up in the Loggia, top of the Macintosh building.
Suddenly from the “Hen Run” adjoining I hear shots. The student next to me had installed a Western style shooting gallery as his degree piece…. I had to find a new space sharpish.
Well, we did get the filming done, once the South American players stopped for an early afternoon siesta but this is one of the problems when you are working with sound and in a public space.
You have got to be prepared to think fast and find solutions.
“Listen to your tutors”. That was the advise from an artist whose workshop I attended before going to art college as a mature student.
Of course I didn’t! And I regret it. Now ten years later words from some tutors come floating back to me, words that at the time I ignored because I reckoned I knew better.
Yes there was an awful lot of dubious pseudo-intellectual jargon talked but there was a core of excellence at Glasgow School of Art and it was a case of tapping into it.
I thought of this the other day while attending a workshop in the Changing Room gallery Stirling on video performance.
“ We want to make you feel a bit uncomfortable. We want to get you out of your comfort zone.”
Yes I heard words similar to those ten years ago …except then I chose to ignore it because I did not appreciate what they were getting at.
If you do work that you know and are comfortable with you are not stretching yourselves, you are not pushing boundaries.
And if you know in advance what you want to do then you are doing somebody else’s work.
Forth Valley Open Studios
Publicity is kicking in. A number of artists have been contacted by our local papers and have been interviewed.
(www.forthvalleyopenstudios.com)
Forth Valley Open Studios – brochure with the printers and pdf now online- www.forthvalleyopenstudios.com
This year we are going to concentrate more on social media for coverage. Local newspapers are very much hit and miss affairs. Last year we found that those studios that tweeted and facebooked their event got the biggest number of visitors.
The Changing Room gallery in Stirling organised the first of a series of three perfromance video workshops. I guess if the eight of us who turned up knew in advance what we would be asked to do then some of us might have backed up. But it was challenging. They warned us they wanted to make us feel a bit uncomfortable and they sure did.
We had an exercise akin toi speed dating- two minutes around the group gleaning as much information as we could then we each hd to sit in front of a video camera and perform the character we had created.
We get to see the result next Tuesday.
Just heard today that Glasgow Art Fair has been cancelled. It is being replaced by something called Vault in the autumn which it is claimed will reflect more accurately contemporary art being produced in the city compared to the traditional work offered by galleries showing in the annual Art Fair held in Glasgow Square.
While this will be a blow to painters it does have the potential to showcase more exciting work being produced in the city.
Meanwhile our brochure for this years Forth Valley Open Studios has finally been signed off by the web designer and its gone to press.
Despite all our plans to be well ahead we have found ourselves slipping back and we now only have six weeks to the event which starts on June 11.
We have over 100 artists and 71 venues participating so we are confident that once again it will be a success.
This is an artist led initiative with no public funding. We rely totally on income from artists who pay £75 to go in the brochure.
This is backed up with a limited amount of revenue from advertising . None of us on the committee like the idea of selling adverts so it is a miracle we have any at all.
