Response to Tutor Feedback – Assignment 1

Overall, I was pleased with the feedback from my tutor. She said the drawings were good, which helps my confidence and that my level of reflection and evaluation is high. She pointed out that learning log is underdeveloped and this is an area I will need to work on. The process of documenting my work is fairly new to me, but as I progress through the course, this will become more natural and easier.

My artist research related to the project is limited and doesn’t really say what they mean to me – I don’t have a lot of experience in this area. My tutor suggested exploring a wider range of artists to find work that I can relate to. She also gave me some ideas to work around my hang-up of ‘copying’ the work of others, which I have been looking into.

Sketchbooks were another area that needs work – I need to show more development to the final drawings.

My tutor gave me a few points to work on, including researching drawing methods, media and tools. I’ve bought a copy of ‘Expressive Drawing’ by Steve Aimone to help me explore and loosen up my ideas of drawing.

 

Research – Artists

Alison Carlier 1971

Alison graduated in 1993 with a BSc (Hons) in Occupational Therapy. She went on to gain BA (Hons) Fine Art in 2002 and an MA in Drawing in 2013. She also won the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2014 with ‘Adjectives, lines and marks’. The piece is an extract from a reference book about Roman excavations in South London read aloud by the artist. It describes a “hard, red pot” Roman pot found in Southwark.

Alison is a sound artist. She uses pre-recorded or live spoken text which allows the listener to visualise their own ‘drawing’.

Speaking about ‘Lines, adjectives and marks’, Alison says “On reading the text aloud, I realised the piece worked similarly to prose. It exists in your head, rather than in a made or finished way. This open-endedness puts it in a similar place to some drawing conventions.”

Alison has an unconventional approach which challenges the convention of drawing.

www.alisoncarlier.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29228688

 

Research – Artists

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

Born in Paris, Louise studied mathematics at the Sorbonne before turning to art in 1932 after the death of her mother. Though she is probably best known for her sculpture, she was also a painter and printmaker. She never claimed to be a surrealist, but her work is highly symbolic and draws on themes of loneliness, conflict, frustration and vulnerability. She drew on her personal life and childhood for inspiration.

Within her drawings, she used repetitive lines and marks to emphasise her themes.

www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/louise-borgeois-2351

http://www.moma.org/explore/collection/lb/index

 

Stage 1 – Gathering Materials (Brainstorming)

Of the four themes the brief offered (Tropical Tourist, Style Lounge, Iced Landscape, Nature’s Larder), Nature’s Larder was the first that jumped out at me. This one seemed to ‘speak’ strongly, immediately throwing all sorts of themes and ideas my way. I decided to go with instinct on this one.

 The brief asked me to think of visual and tactile qualities, properties, materials and objects that my chosen theme brought to mind. It was surprisingly hard to think of purely visual qualities, which is interesting because sight is often the first way a human engages with the world around them. Anyway, I fared better with tactile qualities – my list included ‘smooth’, ‘fuzzy’, ‘hairy’, ‘juicy’ and ‘spiky’ to name a few. I’m drawn to textiles largely because of the tactile qualities, so this is probably why this list was longer.

 I moved on to types of foods – I was trying to think of things in their natural state ‘primary producers’ if you will, (going back to secondary school biology lessons here), and came up with various things. When I looked into it, it made me then think of what those producers need to survive, thus leading onto ‘survival of the fittest’ as a concept. I also came up with ‘food chain’, ‘life cycle’, ‘hidden treasure’, and animals laying down stores for winter.

 I didn’t have a specific concept in mind at this point, but I was thinking of an overall theme of cycles and trying to represent the links between living things, perhaps a little bit beyond the scope of this initial assignment.

 Let the gathering begin!