Reclusive Students or Artistic Exhibitionists – where are all my fellow students?
Well the exhibition is now just a month away, with two weeks left until we begin to hang our work on the studio-turned-gallery walls. It's all very exciting, and I can't wait to see all the work up. It will also be very interesting to see what the other students have been up to – one of the main reasons I came to university was to interact and work alongside other students, rather than paint alone at home – however the vast majority choose to paint/work away from the school and some I have barely seen since the start of term in September. Where do they put themselves? With the "teaching" in the final year reduced to a half-hour tutorial every fortnight, surely students would want to get something for their money? A studio space at least! Its there, why not use it? If you pay for a car, you drive it, don't you?
Meanwhile, as the rest of the UK has been shivering in the chill of April, we students in Aberystwyth have enjoyed weeks of unbroken sunshine – spring reached us months ago! This also makes painting outdoors much more pleasant too.
I seem to have spent all my time making frames for my paintings, rather than painting. I am quite aware that the time spent framing will not alter my marks, and if I'd spent more time painting my marks would probably be better. However, I have saved a fortune on framing costs, and as some of the wood was free from a friend and some came from a skip, plus I'm also pretty handy with the studio mitre saw and my staple gun, it made sense to do my own framing. However, the frames are now finished which leaves me with the best part of two weeks to paint at leisure. There are of course sketchbooks and visual diaries to collate and tidy up, plus that essay! I thought I had the essay finished, having read and re-read the text over and over, inserted my images, checked the footnotes etc, only to find when gate-crashing (or class-crashing) a lecture on neo-romantic landscape artists, there were some points so relevant to my theme I just had to re-write some pages to get them in! Heavy sigh. This has now pushed me well over the 5,000 word limit, though according to a colleague is now 6,000 – I wish they'd make up their minds.
So its all hands on deck now to get the studios cleared out for the exhibition – time to bin those old paint clogged turps jars and moth eaten old paint rags… on my visit to the skip however I retrieved more than I dumped – loads of hardboard off cuts in really useful sizes! Whoopee, I'm all for recycling.
