Confidence is a tricky thing to measure – it comes and goes sometimes without warning. It’s helpful, often necessary, for some activities.
I enjoyed Monday’s group crit session – a welcoming and mutually respectful environment – what a crit should be.
Building confidence and feeling good about the week ahead – however, doubts re-entering by the end of the week (what is my practice, what am I looking at actually, how is it going to manifest itself?) and then turned around by a good solid few hours working alone on Saturday.
Recently working in an attempt to reduce this up and down pattern through pinpointing doubts and logically looking at the reasons behind these doubts and negative thoughts is helpful but an ongoing process, and perhaps a never concluding one.
Summarising the crit, not just for a record but to solidify ideas and possibilities is, and confidently said:
Exploring possibilities for future direction and development.
Agreeing about aesthetic
Being a bit braver.
Not being so selective with reality.
Including everything, not filtering certain things out.
Not looking back in terms of a painterly approach to the visual aesthetic but forwards.
Creating contrast with the more graphic elements by employing more random, incidental marks to create greater depth and layers within the work.
Researching imagery from social media, a source of banal imagery, real images.
Keeping the sources authentic, a documentation of everyday life. Further exploration of the use of found and real objects within the work: used as a means to contrast with the abstracted forms and graphic representations.
Suggestion of using printed images with appropriated imagery – possibilities of reproduction, also potential for inclusion of video and text.
Using all or some of these devices to take the starting point of the installations to something much further.
Safe to daring, perhaps ugly?
