Author: Suzanne Conboy-Hill

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How tall do you have to be to be an artist?

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

I’m asking because I’m currently up to the ears in A1 boards, flip charts, sketch paper, and a completely unwieldy portfolio. Art in 2018 seems to be considerably more physical than it was back in the day and I’m seriously compromised by dodgy shoulders, short arms, and inadequate legs. Not that I’m minute, I’m not. I’m of ‘average height for women’ – or I was but looking around I have a feeling that statistic may be out of date. Also, I’ve most likely reached the point where actual shrinkage is a thing. Vehicles have always been problematic with their layout … Continue reading How tall do you have to be to be an artist?

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Part 1 Form and gesture

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Project 1 Feeling and expression Exercise 1 Expressive lines and marks   I spent quite a long time figuring out what was required here – draw textures, rub textured items with a pencil, stick things onto the page and work with those? I did the dumb thing and drew the dead twig I’ve had in a pot for months. But it wasn’t about drawing, as such, was it? It was about making textures from textured things and experimenting with media and ways of subverting those to serve the image. I think. Top left is the neglected bit of door-frame, scratched … Continue reading Part 1 Form and gesture

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Part 1 Calm, anger, joy, and – hm – satisfaction?

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

This is Exercise 1 and here’s the dreaded blank sheet. First up, Anger as there’s nothing quite like chasing a cyclist down a no-cycling path for getting the grrr factor going. So that’s what using Public Service Broadcasting as background to ‘no, not a clue thank you very much’. PSB’s music is quite fast so it made for more energetic sweeps of the media, and the predictably jagged appearance of most of these is consistent with the association between word shape and perception of softness/spikiness (the Bouba/Kiki effect) which is an influence I can’t really escape very well just because … Continue reading Part 1 Calm, anger, joy, and – hm – satisfaction?

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Fineliners, charcoal,calligraphy pens, and a Minor Moment

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Yesterday, Amazon coughed up a roll of fineliners, a box of charcoal sticks, and three calligraphy pens and I decided to road test them. The fineliners are indeed fine, starting at 0.05 and graduating up to 0.8 but mysteriously excluding 0.7. There are two uncategorised brushes which seem the same size. I’ve not usually paid much attention to how implements work before so focusing on their handling, cornering, and tread (as it were) revealed some interesting observations. the tiniest finiest caused me to hold the pen quite firmly and make delicate, well-contained strokes. No exuberance there, it was like drawing … Continue reading Fineliners, charcoal,calligraphy pens, and a Minor Moment

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New drawing kit and a slight trauma

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Yesterday, Amazon coughed up a roll of fineliners, a box of charcoal sticks, and three calligraphy pens and I decided to road test them. The fineliners are indeed fine, starting at 0.05 and graduating up to 0.8 but mysteriously excluding 0.7. There are two uncategorised brushes which seem the same size. I’ve not usually paid much attention to how implements work before so focusing on their handling, cornering, and tread (as it were) revealed some interesting observations. the tiniest finiest caused me to hold the pen quite firmly and make delicate, well-contained strokes. No exuberance there, it was like drawing … Continue reading New drawing kit and a slight trauma

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The Good Student*

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

*With no apologies at all to Paul McVeigh whose book, The Good Son, is the best tale about growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles you’ll ever read, Man Booker Prize winners notwithstanding. On Audible, it’s even better because the man himself is reading it. So, what does it take to be a Good Student? It’s a question I’m asking myself again at the start of another course, and I’m asking it in the context of striving for that in the past and also observing student trainees of my own doing the same during their clinical placements. The related … Continue reading The Good Student*

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Insightful madness

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

That’s today. Why? Because on the one hand I’m dithering over a warm-up exercise for the drawing course (a warm-up exercise!) and on the other I’m pricing up art work for the forthcoming village Christmas Fair in November. If anything says conflicted more than the fear of not being able to make temporary patterns with crumbs or water or, in my case, cold coffee, set against assigning a public value to your own paintings then I don’t want to meet it in a dark alley. Here’s the cold coffee, and if you aren’t seeing colliding galaxies, swirling star systems, and that bit … Continue reading Insightful madness

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Part 1 Form and gesture

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

Exercise 1 Temporary patterns Frankly, this warm-up exercise put the frighteners on me so much as to induce brain-freeze. No pencils, no paper, nothing familiar at all about making patterns that disappear in a moment. Why is that alarming? Well, just because, that’s why. The solution was to jump headlong into it*, preferably before I had my eyes open and while that lump of cells in my skull was still chugging along in one of its sleep rhythms, hence this is the most domestic of pattern sets – the breakfast routine. The first, strictly speaking, was not made by me, … Continue reading Part 1 Form and gesture

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Discovery

Suzanne Conboy-Hill

This should have been obvious and if I’d held my horses instead of plunging headlong into getting a blog up and running (procrastination, I suspect, beats getting the frighteners by looking at an actual assignment) it would have dawned at a more timely point in the process. This course is Drawing 1, and it’s called that because there will be a Drawing 2. Also a Painting 1 and a Painting 2, another unit I haven’t chosen yet, and a final year negotiated element. That’s six different units with six different sets of requirements and WordPress can only accommodate one template … Continue reading Discovery