http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 Glasgow School of Art Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:59:59 +0100 a-n rss generator a-n The Artists Information Company and contributors edit@a-n.co.uk technical@a-n.co.uk http://sites.a-n.co.uk/img/logo.gif http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 This is quite a momentous occasion, I am for the first time taking part in something that apparently is taking the country by storm, blogging. My mother describes it as being part of the 'look at me' culture that has suddenly become subsumed into my generation's lifestyle. Is it self-obsessive? I am, after all, writing this to other people, telling them what I think without interuptions for disagreements.  I shall attempt to stick to art talk and art talk that I think will be of value to other people in my situation.Yesterday i was on top of the world (this is quite funny because my video looks like me, sitting on a globe!). My group crit went really, really well. My classmates engaged with my work criticised usefully and constructively and everyone said my video was really good! Final year at GSA suddenly heralded the dawn of the new critical crit. Over the summer we all came back with the power to destroy someone's idea...well not quite so harshley, but it is fair to say that some of us suffered in crits in a way that had never happened before. In the process however we've stopped discussing the more conceptual content of the work and stuck to what works and doesn't work and how the person could make it better. In my crit in the first term I felt I had to fight for my right to make the work I was making, this time round the student's criticisms confirmed my own misgivings about the work. The lesson I learnt was to have confidence in my ability to think critically about my work.Having been so happy yesterday today I had another day of not being quite motivated, inspired, hard-working or organised enough. This is the problem with deadlines, they loom and eat away at your ability to trust your own judgement. I'd like to just paint and not stop until it is finnished, but I have to wait for layers to dry and to prime board and print out images (I work form phtographs that I either find on the internet or take myself) so I find myself sitting around alot trying to think of something to do next or just procrastinating. My next task is to write lists of things I need to do and plan my time so as to be able to use it more effectively, this does not sound fun...booo. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 AHA! I have finally figured out how to add to my blog. Today I shall talk about what my work IS. I paint, because I enjoy it, because it is what I have been trained to do and because it taps into a realm that I am fascnated by: the imagination. This is not to say that other forms of art aren't imaginative, but the two dimensions of a painted image call on a viewer to exercise their imagination. Unlike a sculpture, a painting rarely heightens the viewers sense of their physical presence in relation to the work. A painting (or maybe just the kind that I try to make) requires you to stop being conscious of yourself, here and now,and imagine the moment that was captured in paint.Paint itself is such a bizzare concept: colour in suspension. Monitoring the behaviour of paint is an important part of making a painting and in that way it can be quite scientific. Sometimes I'm bak in my scool's science lab mixing different chemicals to see what happens (green flames, explosions and a plastic tub with the bottom dissolved away!). An oil based and water based pigment won't mix and this is rich territory for colour and textural experimentation.The subject matter of my paintings has changed alot from my original concern with the boundaries between reality and illusion as exemplified by the combination of abstract and figurative elements in a black, void-like, space. (see figure) Now I am concerned with that space, the endless possibilities that it allows for.I start from a matt black, as I said it really is a void, hence the painting is a process of placing isolated 'things' into this void and deciding what to turn the space into. A black ground requires you to light it, part of deciding what this space will be is also deciding how to light it. In my most recent work (still in progress, I'm afraid you will have to wait for photos) the light comes from a big white flower suspended in the black. The board is an odd shape (40x80cm portrait) and for a while I didn't think it would work but by I lit the lower right hand corner and created a 'floor'. Suddenly the painting is a whole, not only compositionally, but also conceptually. I am playing with space and suggesting that this suspended organic mass is real and not a decorative pattern. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 Hello all!This stage of the game is a mighty slog. The vision is there I just have to make it happen....MISSION! I have to say this time last year I thought I'd be having much more fun in my final year, I was sadly mistaken. Getting up at 7am to get into college and discover that every one is already in isn't easy! I find myself longing for an empty studio just so as I can feel like I'm ahead!!!Tomorrow I am filming. I have roped in my boyfriend to help me cover myself head to toe in grey face paint in an attempt to make myself look like a plasticene (still haven't discovered how to spell that word!!) model (see figure). The model is based on a character that featured in a few drawings I made way back in first term. The character turned out to be an alter ego of mine, a naked balaclava'ed woman. I don't know why the balaclava, perhaps a way of hiding distinguishing features, an attempt to make the figure more universal. Or maybe I just wanted to make drawings about my own difficult unexpressed emotions without saying that that person was me. Maybe the character wanted to do that too. So I made the plasticene figure and it sits on a polystirene ball suspeneded and spining against a black back drop. Shots of the figure are interspersed with shots of a fish bowl filled with white water which ink drips into. It's amazing what you can do with a bowl of water some light and ink. It's just beautiful how the ink swirls and separates and when you light it it casts these rippling shddows that I just love! That's the beauty of video you can just play with light and colour and movement and it's there for everyone to see. The difficulty is making soemthing that people might want to watch! So as part of the attempt to make something interesting/intriguing/challenging/ uncanny and hopefully revolutionary and preferably earth-shattering and mind-blowing, I am going to prance around in front of a camera naked. And eventually I'll be showing it to other people at a degree show! HAHA! I hadn't factored in that my tutors will be seeing this and all my class-mates and my DAD!!!!Yours somewhat aprehensively,Leah ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 So today for the first time in God knows how long I entered into a painting trance!!!! The studio was empty and free of distractions so I painted and thought, looked up, and an hour and a half had past. It's what I've missed so much being at art school just painting and not thinking. The ability to not think is something that I think all artists should engage with. All too often I find myself getting caught up in wandering whether the works too cheesy, too cliche, irrelevant, overstated, understated, boring...etc. My tutors call it cultural relevance, functioning within a discourse or it's ability to engage a viewer, I call it paranoia. At a certain point it's necessary to take those issues into consideration, but this week I have learnt to know when to switch that overly critical voice off.I think it is important to decide how necessary a good 'think' is how productive that 'think' will be. In the course of the past year I have discovered that there is a tendency within art to create ideas, if you think long and hard enough about this idea, the argument will be water tight. People paint photograph sculpt document an idea with a hint of ambiguity thrown in. It leaves a viewer thinking that there is more to this work but they're not well read enough to know about it. Perhaps if you stuck with the piece for a long time, heard the artist talk about it, read the artist's statement, you might actually understand it. But so often I think 'I can't be arsed! I'm being given nothing so why should I give anything back?'. Why do artists feel the need to belittle their audience? Because their audience is artists who've read as much as them and have gained the stamina necessary to endure the experience. I wander if maybe if these people stopped thinking and just enjoyed the doing the excitement would be enough to entice a viewer to want to know more. Are you still with me? I think I've touched on a nerve here! I try to make art that is a happy patchwork of inklings, nigling feelings, difficult emotions and vulnerability. Work that a secular culture or a culture steeped in a necessity to classify and order finds problematic to consider. And yes, arrogantly I admit, I want to touch on a universality of human experience (ok ok I know this is impossible...but bear with me here because naive I am not). I start with myself always, my art grows with me and at each stage represents (presents anew) my experience of...life. It is an aspect of my life that I don't know or understand or even recognise until it is there staring me in the face. Hence why I think that stopping myself from 'thinking' allows me to channel (I sound like a hippy!) a truer and less mediated or sensored part of myself.... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 I have been thinking about abstraction. The etymology of the word is quite interesting: from latin literally 'drawn away'. So in art it is removed from a representation of reality. I find it interesting because absraction in a sense is more real than representation in that it is not attempting to be something else, it is paint, pigment. When I combine abstraction and figuration in a painting I find that in my mind I try to give the abstract marks the same existence as the figure. My mind tries to make sense of it, is it a piece of rock or is it an explosion? It's the ever fascinating line between reality and the imagination.I have started to make models to paint from. I make them out of clay, flowers, these wierd decorative orbs I got from a tacky shop, and photographs of myself. In the photographs I'm doing odd things like reaching up to catch something or holding a wooly hat against my tummy to look like a pregnant belly! But most importantly I mould the clay into solid abstract shapes that I then sit the figures and objects on to or into. Which is why I'm thinking about abstraction. The clay allows me to play with the compositional possibilities of the figurative side turning it into a series of shapes and lines, while the figures give life to the abstract shapes. That's just the technical side of it all. I'm creating a space that is huge compared to the figure and completely unrecognisable. The figure itself is locked in an act of trying to conect itself to something or reach or catch something. It's engaged in these child like activities but is quite clearly a young nude and therefore vulnerable adult.Does it make sense? I'm afraid I still do not have images. Substandard blogger! ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625 I've done it again... made explicitly feminist artwork! A while ago I was making giant nude paintings of myself and reading about feminist artwork. It became such a hinderance to making the actual work that I eventually started to make a conscious effort not to include any concern with feminity. Tutors along the way however have asked me about it whenever it resurfaces and I would just brush it off. I have finally begun to realise that I am concerned with portraying a personal experience of life. From a female perspective it can't really help but be feminist. Having listened to and seen contemporary feminist artwork, however, I have noticed that it easily becomes an overtly politicised message. It's cold and almost agressively challenging whilst being steeped in a heavy and almost inaccessible language. So without realising it I needed to aproach feminism from a different angle. So that it didn't become a debilitating 'concern', that stoped me from relaxing into the proces of making work. ... Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0100 http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/415625