Two of the three paintings I’ve been working on are now finished, and I’m feeling ready to move on and start something new. I’ve just started a little study based on the night photos in my last post, but I have a tutorial with someone who’s never seen my work before later this week, so it will be interesting to get a different opinion before I launch into new ideas.
I’ve designated today a Dissertation Day as I’m sat at home house-sitting while a huge tree in our garden is being chopped down!
It’s going well so far and I’m quite enjoying writing it. My title is “Mapping contemporary experience: a study of three artists and their unconventional geographies”. Essentially, I’m looking at the ways artists have used the practice of mapping to reflect certain things about 21st century life. The chapter that I’ve just completed looks at Matthew Ritchie and his approach to mapping the “information saturation age”. I’ve just started the second chapter (and hopefully will have done a lot more of it by the end of today), which is entitled “Julie Mehretu: mapping the contemporary metropolis”, and the third and final chapter looks at Sarah Sze’s installations and her use of shifts in scale.
It’s been really interesting researching the artists in such detail, and also having to write about how they have influenced my work. I find myself writing about how a certain aspect of my painting relates to theirs, and remembering why I work the way I do in the first place! Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in your own little world and lose sight of the bigger picture.
