Monday 30 October 2017

Course Notes 31st October

Happy Halloween!

My time has been split 60:40 between course writing & course making.

I'm up to around 3,000 words on my dissertation. I can't tell you yet if they are all in the right order, but according to Word that's where I'm at.

I have to say, that in comparison to the last dissertation I wrote this one is a whole lot easier. For my first one, all those years ago, when I had no personal computer, no car, no internet and almost no life skills (I survived on pasta, mayonaise and sweetcorn), I had to write the whole bloody thing; 12,000 words on a manual typewriter in a week. My fingers throbbed with pain. I was set on writing about art in Berlin during the period of the Berlin Wall: a fascinating subject I think most people would agree. Mum and I spent a week in freezing February 1993 traipsing round, trying to find our way around the former East Berlin. It was fascinating. It was cold. One big issue with the subject matter: I don't speak or read German. I scraped a pass, I don't know how, I can only think of the reason being that I took the time to visit.

This time I'm working on something much more manageable and armchair researchable: I'm looking at the dichotomy of being inside/outside, of passing through.

Inside / Outside? That sounds simple doesn't it? Except that the more I look into it the larger, more complex, and more interrelated it gets. Of course that's the fruit of knowledge - the closer you bring it to your mouth the larger it gets, and you can never digest it all. That's something I really like about contemporary art, it's endlessly interesting - the more questions you ask the more questions you discover and there are so many rabbit holes to disappear into. For me, the dichotomy of inside/outside is a case of one's length and depth of vision being altered by the environment as you move from within to outside. Furthermore a question is raised about being 'between' but I am most particularly interested in where a lack of difference in how places look can lead the viewer to feel discombobulated. It's something about where a difference should be, and isn't.

So writing-wise that's all interesting and good. Artwork - well, it felt a bit frustrating not to be making resolved work until I remembered that I'm supposed to be experimenting this semester. So I've been doing a bit more of that, as well as sneakily trying to bring a larger scale work to completion - just to see if I can. I've just handed in my proposal for this module's artwork and there will be an opportunity to present that to a group, so I will feedback on that probably in my next post.

I also spent a couple of days invigilating at CET (Coventry Telegraph's old home) 'The Future' at Coventry's first biennial. Some images of current work and from that below.


WIP: Iceberg and Power Station. Improbable structures and something about drawing what could not happen (?). There will be more steam rising.
 Detail from above. There's going to be more of this.
Collage experiment: Incised lines partially filled with charcoal. An attempt at something like Roni Horn's collages - the precision and the finger marks. I wanted to try and make lines another way and I really enjoy the precision of line vs the totally random and nebulous pastel powder (I sprayed the paper with fixative and pressed it onto some pastel dust on the cover of my sketchbook that had fallen off another work, then fixed that. You can see where I discovered it wasn't fixed.)


Some painty swiping pages from my sketchbook with paint left over from painting pumpkins and bats for my daughter.

The rest are from CET Coventry Biennial. Dashes of colour and perspective. The works employing audio filled the space most effectively, but some other artworks seemed a bit lost. It was a privilege to have been able to spend so much time there.



Saturday 7 October 2017

Course notes Oct 17

This post is going to comprise mostly of my thoughts following my first tutorial.

This is the first artwork 'Sunset at Chesterton Mill' I've completed since then. Not sure if I'm going to continue in this way exactly, but the process really seems to help me though to the end of a work, so I will be hanging on to that.

Main thoughts were that I should in somehow carry on in my current mode and experiment with scale and possibly texture. We talked about how I drew until I reached a point of recognition of a memory; not particularly somewhere I've seen more a melting together of moments, and now I consider it, that's what happened with this painting/drawing.

I had intended to fill in the whole shape with architectural forms in graphite, chalk & koh-i-noor leads and I'd been at that for 2 days, then there was a point when I looked at it and I slightly recognised the upright and left-leaning thick lines - which were being worrying me until then - as the legs of Chesterton Mill.

The Mill is a C16 building on top of a hill near home where I've done some sketching; you can see a long way from it but I'd become fascinated by the patina on the stone. I took my small family there on the last weekend of the summer holidays to watch the sun go down because you can't see it from my house and it was a warm night. It was something unusual to do together to mark the end of the summer break, and it was free. We obviously weren't the only ones with the idea because there were plenty of people there and the place had a nice atmosphere. Teenagers larking about, people and dogs, photographers with cameras on tripods. My 5 year old daughter had a fun time running around the soy-bean field and mill in the half-light.

As soon as I realised this the painting came together and finished really quickly. Now I've come to naming it - naming is important to me, the words create a complementary picture - so, I'm thinking it could be called 'Sunset at the old mill', or 'Sunset at Chesterton Mill' as above. And it really pleases me that I've ended up with a painting that looks entirely different to what a painting called the same name might have looked like 100 years ago.

There is a part of it that is about being inside and outside the house. A house is all corners and framed vision; you are always looking through doorways as you move around a house, which you constantly do. Outside, particularly from a viewpoint like this, you can literally see for miles, it really frees your mind, and you take some of that with you when you go back home. I was going to call it 'inside / outside / inside' or something like that to map our little trip out.


Other notes.
Advised to look at art of Paul Noble & Charles Avery who create worlds via drawing - leads me to reconsider a direction my artwork was taking about a year ago that I discarded then because it seemed too unusual.





And, although I intend to look at scaling up, I did this little experiment. Acrylic on a scrap of mount board. I like that I can't control the paint too much and it really is a shape incised out of the background - somehow that's important, don't know why.