The parent category for research and reflection posts.
This is a little way off the ‘rift’ topic although it might be preparatory. I made a painting from one of my own photos of sheep sheltering from the sun in a thicket and deliberately included a strip of the … Continue reading Personal painting – Rift #2
This session happened a little while ago and so I have had time to reduce detail to concept, although the detail I had requested – whether OCA used an absolute measure for essay word count or the more usual +/- 10% (it’s the latter) – was a welcome one that needed no reduction. Some points, the matter of ethics in research for instance, have become redundant for now as I have decided against running a survey at the forthcoming art trail. My sense is that the logistics of the setting may not be conducive. Another, relating to a discussion about … Continue reading Addressing formative feedback
Key words: Rifts, meaning, physical, digital, and hybrids. These are the key words for the essay required for this module. Rifts because this is the area I’ve focused on for the painting practice component of this module; meaning because I’ve been banging on about making art meaningful to people who may never go to galleries, and physical/digital because art has always made use of whatever new technologies were available to it, from the camera obscura (see Hockney’s 2001 discussion) to Chevreul’s influence on colour theory. And this is before we get to performance art, filmic art, and transient art. There … Continue reading Essay component: preliminary plan
Two triumphs in one – my very first home-made greenscreen stop motion video featuring that banana, and an editing discovery that subverts YouTube’s recent no-choice Shorts conversion for videos that might a) be less than a minute long or b) portrait aspect ratio. These links don’t embed in WordPress or are recognised for the making of QR codes so, in case you’re reading this and it’s happening to you, the trick is to edit the link thus: Your YouTube generated link might look something like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/_thV9qFt_u0?feature=share [Note; this link is for illustration only, I removed the video it originally … Continue reading Fruit flies like a banana …
This is a reading task centred on Marina Warner’s 2001 book, Fantastic Metamorphosis, other worlds: ways of telling the self. I don’t really understand the title – what does ‘telling the self’ mean? – but the book uses Bosch’s Garden of Delights as its focus for discussion of fantasy, self, and the kinds of metamorphoses found in fairy tales. Perhaps the telling is related to psychological self-talk. I struggled with this, having never read Ovid or Plato, or in fact, any of the other texts to which Warner refers. There are tracts of Latin which I doubt my 1960s school … Continue reading Inventory of Dreams: project 4
The second task is to choose an option for the next exercise, 4.2, and then research the four artists associated with that. My preferred option here is narrative (b) and so the artists to look at comprise first, Paula Rego (1935-) whose work I was first introduced to in Drawing Skills 1 way back in 2018/19. Her pastel drawings/painting of dancers contrasting almost comedically with the luminescent delicacy of Degas’ ‘petit rats’. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/paula-rego-1823 I’ve written a lot, or possibly the same thing several times, about Rego. The links are here and largely for my own record as I can see … Continue reading Mystery: option 4, project 3, second task
The first task is to read the eBook, Short History of the Shadow (1997) by Victor I Stoichita, and make notes or perhaps drawings to record any thoughts. I was able to access a PDF via Ex Libris. We seem to be talking here about the speculations of a man who died in AD 79 (Pliny) and the later constructions placed on this by Plato and Hegel. Pliny said that painting began when ‘men’ drew around their shadow, which I suspect is not substantiated by later research on cave drawings where it seems all but demonstrated that people first blew … Continue reading Mystery: project 3 ‘Short History of the Shadow’
Project 2: gaps and spaces. I knew I had seen this because I had opened up some YouTube tabs and some static pages of images, but then forgot by somehow mentally integrating it with the research point and only when I’d finished that, wondering what these tabs were about. This may have been fortuitous as I think the preceding work will make this task easier. This, I think, is the video; the links in the course materials aren’t active but there is a searchable title. There is also this video which is a longer version of the one above. McKeever … Continue reading Ian McKeever
To quote the course materials, this exercise is to “gain experience in working with very different source material and gain confidence in working with e-journals” and to gain a deeper understanding of “how artists ‘know’ their subject and how they use that knowledge.” The two references are: Donachie, Kaye. 2016. Behind her eyelids she sees something […]. J Contemporary Painting, 2, 1, pp11-20. Intellect. Morley, Simon. 2016. A ‘shimmering thing at the edge of analysis’: figure/ground and the paintings of Agnes Martin. J Contemporary Painting. 2, 1, pp 39-56. Intellect. The links in the course materials are not active but … Continue reading Part 4, project 2, research task
There were two stand-out elements to this discussion and the formative feedback that followed. The first was very clear support for the digital process, whether via painting/photo editing apps or animation and film, and that development of expertise here would count towards assessment of technique and range of media investigated. The second related to the notion of influences. I have never been conscious of influences in any sphere of academic application or practice; which is not to say there have been none, it simply means I have most likely absorbed the gestalt of the influence(r) and forgotten the rest. I … Continue reading Response to assignment 1 tutorial discussion -influences
Strayfish Arts 