This post is going to cover the first week of setting up my degree show.
my ideas are currently not yet hear. i’m still optimistic that if I keep going how i’m going I will before long I will come up with a good idea for my final outcome.
I have started cleaning out my old studio space and get into my new space. im hoping to get more ideas being in a new space with a different layout. im hoping that this will give me the jolt of inspiration that I need. I have sanded the walls down and filled in the gaps as well as cleaned the floor. I thought it was best to try and clean what I can off the floor even though I know i’m only going to have to do it again in a few weeks. once I have painted the walls.
I have also started to bring all my work in from home. I decided to try and do this now and bring it in as soon as possible. that way it is one less thing to worry about. as the weeks go on. I didn’t want to rush trying to bringing it all in,. plus I thought that it may help being surrounded by all this art to come up with a final show.
in this week I also rented my projector. i thought that it would be a good idea to try and get this as soon as possible because i know i want to do something with projection I’m just not to sure what it actually is that i want to do with it.
I have desided to add this interview to my blog because I thought that it brought a breath of fresh air. I have been looking over my work and I cant help but feel that it has all been some what depressing. like a lot of bad memories one after another. i’m not saying that I haven’t added one or two happy stories and good memories. But a lot of it has just made me feel down and that’s not what i wanted to portray from this project. This project to me is about acceptance and being proud of who I am. a project that shows i’m more the what people thought i would be. I am a person I have feelings and thoughts (some of which are very complex)
This interview is talking about the things that dyslexic people have accomplished over the years. In the world of business and in the there personal lives. I felt the need to add this because it brought a smile to me face. and the fact that it was looking at what people had achieved.
I personally feel that this is a good video to watch if you are in need of finding the good in humanity.
I was scrolling through images upon images, of the same sort of art that i have been looking at for weeks. I couldn’t help but feel that I had became trapped, in an endless cycle of books and letters page after page after page. i’m a strong believer of the saying;
“always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got.” I cant help but feel that the lack of new and interesting ideas for the degree show kinda proves my point. I decided that I needed a brake a new injection of inspiration. like all good ideas I needed to switch it up a gear and try find a new layer to my work. I felt the need to be playful, and with the sun being out I felt like today was a good day. yes, today was going to be the day I worked out what I needed. I decided to close the book, the tab and the thought of looking at another Painting from Fiona Banne, ( not that i have anything against her work, I just needed a new force of visual imagery, to gorge on) I decided that I was going to turn my hand to painting again. but I was just going to jump in. I was in the mood for some abstract painting I felt like all my mind was clogged up. with words. I felt like the cold crisp white background of my work that I have been making over the last few weeks was as boring for me to look at as the books that I had been using to pull my inspiration.
I can’t help but feel that my work had hit a wall, like a concrete text of jargon that you have to break down and work out before you can get yourself out of a phone contract.
thinking about my work I would say that my relationship with words is abstract in the sense that I don’t see them the same way as other people do. this moment, this single thought is what gave me a moment of clarity. it was the background of my work that I felt myself being pulled down by. I remembered a conversation with Robin, about one of my canvases, it was a single white letter “s” on a red and blue background. He said that he thought it was one of my strongest paintings.
I decided to revisit the background of my work. It is such an important part of any image one that I have simply overlooked in my work. I decided to look at the colour wheel as a starting point for these new paintings, I opened my paint box and rummaged through limiting myself to 4-5 colours I would then break down why I chose these colours and work out what it was that I was drawn to. ( there will be a separate blog post about this coming soon) once i had worked this out I would then begin to paint and let my emotions be free.
My new paintings went from bright base coats like Orange and yellow to black. the steps I made in this process was very erratic, I was more getting carried away with covering the canvas in one matt colour before adding any other colour from my pallet. The canvas had to be completely covered the brush strokes went in one direction. I would then spin the canvas around and push the paint again in the opposite direction so the brush strokes would change. This was done one every canvas almost like a religious ritual before I deemed the canvas worthy. As ridiculous as that sounds it was rather relaxing and I felt my confusion and frustration leave me after every stroke. I would then start to add colour to the canvas and feel that the new injection of colour was like a happy uplifting buzz filling my mind with a sense of wonder. I feel that from doing this my work has taken a step in a new direction and I will be interested in seeing where this takes me. even if the use of colour is short lived I do believe it will help full my mind with the new thoughts and questions that I need.
These photos are of the work when I started the process.
so I was in the studio yesterday working on my new A3 sketch book that I am using to plan out the degree show. when I started talking to a student in level 5. he was asking me how I was finding it and I was asking him if he was nervous about moving up to level 6. The conversation led on to my sketchbook work, and we started talking about what the Sketchbook was actually used for. I showed him my A5 red book, that is my diary of the things that I have been doing and I talk about use it to jot down ideas as well as reflect on my state of mind, you can see my moods as you flick through the pages. I see the sketch book as a tool to Explain things to myself a way of showing the questions that I ask myself. to me the sketch book is more for me then it is the tutors. its a place where I can keep track of where my mind state actually is.
I found it interesting to hear what someone else’s opinion on the matter actually was. to me this is how I have progressed with my sketchbook work. in level 4 my work was all done on eaver A5 or A3. i found that the A3 was normally very basic and held more of a lay out of a space, I would use this size book for more visual aid, whereas an A5 book would be filled with writing and was more explaining the idea. this worked for me as a lot of my ideas I come up with them on trains so its naturally a lot easier for me to write them down in a small book then in a A3 size book.
when I moved into level 5 I started using lots of different sketchbooks for different ideas but this didn’t work to well for me as I started losing interests in some projects. this could be due to not looking at a particular book or it getting lost amongst the pile of other books, in the end I was left with lots of books with lots of empty pages. I didn’t like this style of working I felt that I was to stretched I never felt like I was working more playing catch up with books. I personally feel that this was shown in the quality of my presentation of the work. I want happy with this so i decided to go back to the way i felt more comfortable in level 4.
I have found that my sketchbook in level 6 has been a major help, between that little book and this blog I feel I have been able to lay my thought process out the book is like a update, I try to touch base as I call it, putting in ideas or things that I have been up to. I don’t often write in it every day otherwise I feel it would become very repetitive. I summarise conversations that I have had with teachers and I have found when going over the book in some weeks even months that conversation I have had has triggered when looking back and has helped me make a better formed response when I look at my own work.
It was interesting to see another persons take as to what they put in the sketch book. how they felt it was best to keep a big sketch book and they feel the need to cover the page with drawings and artist’s work.
As I sit in my living room, back home in London I have found myself watching a Art documentary.
“Understanding contemporary art- Published on Jan 31, 2013,Category-Education,License-Standard YouTube License”
The documentary was a lecture and it was talking about how art has changed over the years and how artist, went about there practice. It was also talking about documentation. This is the Part that has stood out to me, I wanted to touch upon it on my blog as I feel that this thought is very important to me and my practise, especially when thinking about the way I want to present my final year show.
The lecture was talking about something that was spoken about in my 1st year in one of the lectures. it was about documentation and where the art starts and the way in which we choose to display or record this information has its effects on the outcome and overall way this work will be responded to by the public.
The artist that got me thinking about this was Hamish Fulton, an English artist. who invited people to come on a walk with him. the image is of one of these walks that he done in Margate.
to Hamish the walk is the work, the walk is everything.The photos are just documentation. he also creates a number of poems that he feels captures the essence of walking. so in this scene text becomes sculptural.
It was this that got me thinking about how I was planning to lay out my final show, I was thinking of having a video of me reading a book, but the act of me reading the book is the art the video is documentation. so the question that has now come to my mind is do i want my final outcome to be a video of me reading a book, that goes of for X amount of time. or do I feel that like Hamish a Poem or painting shows the exact same thing. it’s just more engaging with the mind.
from watching this I feel that I have shifted my thoughts on my Practice. Perhaps I have been too blinded by the other options that I could use to layout my work. I think the reason that I have been too quick to brush off any idea of this is because I feel that I became to precious with the book art and I didn’t want to fall back into the same habit that I had last time.
