• Demonstration of technical and visual skills – materials, techniques, observational skills, visual awareness, design and compositional skills.

I thought I could handle perspective but it’s proved unexpectedly difficult – I can see when it’s wrong but correcting it is quite problematic, especially when I bring it into conscious focus. I concentrated on the flyover/underpass images because these were a) the most linear of perspectives but b) because errors couldn’t be fudged, and I developed a technique – drawing out the lines on a photograph – to help me establish the angles. This seems to have worked for me and I think in the later sketches/pieces I’ve more or less pinned it down.

I’ve used a variety of media in the exercises from quite delicate wet-in-wet inks to heavier applications of ink with more precise edges, and I’ve developed one image from monochrome, through bright colour, to near-abstract linear image traced from the previous iteration. I found this a really creative and exploratory process that went way beyond any original thoughts I’d had about the finished piece.

My composition is derived from the photos which I’d composed deliberately to show levels and layers, angles and shadows. I’m not a photographer but I’m not really a snapper of ‘nice views’ either; I lean towards images that have their own angle, sometimes literally.

• Quality of outcome – content, application of knowledge, presentation of work in a coherent manner, discernment, conceptualisation of thoughts, communication of ideas.

My blog is a contemporaneous record of all the work and thinking leading up to and through the execution of the final piece(s) with nothing left out. I’m a first-person informal writer aiming to put on the page the authenticity I feel when I’m going through the experience. I also aim to discuss influences and reference materials with the same accessible clarity and exposure of the reality of the impact they have on me without losing objectivity. I hope these principles come across.

• Demonstration of creativity – imagination, experimentation, invention, development of a personal voice.

This is difficult to assess; what seems to be quite a creative product to me – and much of this does because I know for a fact these pieces would never have come about had I not been challenged to make ‘something’ for this course – may seem rather humdrum to anyone who’s seen a thing or two in their time. I feel as though I’ve experimented quite a lot with size, media, evolution of images, techniques, and even constructive methods designed to help me overcome problematic perspective.

• Context reflection – research critical thinking (as evidenced in learning log).

I log every encounter I have with researched material and my vocabulary is slowly building. Finding inspiration in other artists’ work is still not my go-to strategy but the art canon is slowly seeping in. Will Gompertz’s ‘What are you looking at? 150 years of modern art‘ has been an absolute door-opener for me, and no matter that it probably sits at the lighter end of academic reading, I’ve found it valuable enough to purchase in audio, kindle, and physical forms for their differing functionalities. Brutalism stuck, largely because I’d been referring to the concrete structure of the flyovers as brutal, thinking I’d invented the term and then discovering I hadn’t. There’s something about the word that makes me want to apply paint with a palette knife; then I came across John Virtue who uses big gesture strokes to make abstracts and I had this in mind when making the graffiti underpass. This has been an exciting section of the module despite my antagonism towards statues and my struggles with perspective.