The beginning of something like this always seems quite difficult until you sit down and start scribing. For the record - As part of my course structure I am required to keep some form of journal. Blogging was listed as an option and now it seems by far the most appropriate, what with me losing or ruining most scraps of paper I normally use. Regardless of the course requirements, I think this is something I'll keep up to. The journal so far has been a great help in summing up and exploring experiences in the light of day.
Where to begin?
I named the blog Genuine Interest because I feel its what I have. This might sound obvious to some people and less obvious to others, but I feel that if you don't have a driving ambition or passion surrounding what you intend to study at university /art-school /college /etc then you ought really to rethink whether you should be studying it at all. Coming out of the national curriculum leaves a massive contingent of people brainwashed by the notion that:
"Unless you go to university, you are a failure."
Most of said 'students' are unaware themselves of just how deeply rooted this mantra is within them and will express complete bafflement when confronted with the idea that "maybe its not for you". Said confusion has rarely turned to anything other than anger or distress in my (admittedly limited) experience. I dare say, through conversations I've had with teachers who are more experienced than I, that the rule applies across the board with very little exception these days.
"What?! Not for me?! Are you saying I am a failure and that I'm destined for a mere living?! That I won't be one of those inspirational, interesting and exciting personalities that I based my 'career choices' on?!"
I (and this may read as being arrogant) am proud of the fact that what I do fires me up. I'm not pompous about it and the pride isn't something that I go telling on the mountain often since I think it SHOULD be a standard component to any student's reasons for being where they are, doing what they're doing. None the less I feel enthused by the fact that I have this passion and drive to study the things I am doing, despite the exact focus of the study still shifting occasionally. The reason for calling the blog Genuine Interest lies with my concern of how many people are being 'square pegged' in the round hole of education and not with some gloating sense of superiority to people mistakenly putting themselves in debt for no real reason. I felt the distinction had to be made.
Process and history.
I feel that it is important to understand how I got to where I am currently. Coming out of junior school, I got a scholarship to a Grammar School. I would like to say that I was poached there with promises of how exceptional the facilities and environment was but I would be lying to do so. I went extremely willingly and, of all the examples to randomly pick just now, the facilities and environment were excellent. All the lads pulled together to make sure everyone got through alright and, even though not everyone got along perfectly, the camaraderie was beyond anything I've seen outside of war films and documentaries about the national service. This is boasted to be one of the many boons that adolescents will receive when coming to the school, but if the staff thought that the parents understood why the camaraderie was necessary they would sing quite a different tune. The boys stick together because its us vs. the teachers (a subject that would lead me off into some tangential rant or another and therefore best left alone). We were taught not to chase grades, but to obtain them. Chasing would imply that you're constantly behind the target and our teachers were paid to make sure that, at the cost of everything, we could achieve the grading in the marking system that would instantly make potential employers interested.
In retrospect I can understand how farcical this makes the whole system but at the time I worked hard to achieve the goals set out for me and I honestly thought - "If I keep plugging away at this, I'll get a good job and I will be happy". When I thought I was being taught about Seamus Heaney (who I, regrettably, can't go and see tomorrow at Sheffield) or being invited to enter a dialogue about the poems, I was really being taught buzzwords and essay technique for the national curriculum graders and standards. Things that, regardless of my lack of understanding or sensitivity, would get a mark here and there, ultimately leading to "a more than successful result" I remember one teacher saying. I feel that the opposite is true and whilst memorising facts, figures and jargon can be an assistance, it should surely not be the totality of your education or a guarantee of understanding. To me, the memorising of all these facts and figures without a context or any further understanding of their meaning is as useful as teaching the same data to apes so that they might answer correctly for a banana. I put this to a significantly better tutor from my recent past and he would just laugh, proclaiming that the banana hunting is exactly what he has to put up with in his Foundation Art course. The thing that leads him to despair (or used to) is that with most of the pupils, even when the offer of a more interesting experience is thrown up in the air, they're either too broken or too uninterested to even attempt to catch it.
I believe that, particularly in a subject as personal, intuitive and uncertain as visual arts, the educational ideals of "memorise to pass" and "understanding is a luxury you can't afford yet" are absolutely crippling. Much of this belief was passed to me via a tutor who I shall no doubt frequently mention as he has been my therapist for just over a year now, haha. I still grapple on a day to day basis with the stitching that going to the school I did has left embedded in my brain. Presumption and prejudging work in particular are very dangerous problems with regards to the production of work. You can often bully yourself out of doing work by second-guessing it. To try and grade work (A,B,C+ etc) in such an uncompromising and 'pigeon-hole'y way is absurd when you consider how broad a range of work you'll encounter from different people. The notion that everyone can be universally graded on a set scheme can only possibly be held by people who are insensitive in the extreme to the fact that creative arts, by their very definition, are not united in their agenda, aim or application. Again, I could go on to rant (as I fear I am beginning to do) about how un-necessary grading is to a large extent in all fields and how only a guilt and image-obsessed culture like ours could sponsor such a shallow perception of educational achievement, but the discussion is too lengthy to have here.
I am now part of a degree level course at a small college in the north of england. I am happy, healthy and raring to go every time I hit the studio. I have great difficulty in dealing with the beurocratic and box-ticking side to the system I am in but, when all is said and done, I do what I have to to be allowed the money, space and time to work with. My current tutor claims that I have thrown the baby out with the bathwater whenever we talk about education and how deformed it is from the ideal. He means, of course, that my past encounters with the education organisation have given me some almost equally crippling ant-establishment ideals. I can't say that hes completely correct or incorrect just yet, its something I'll have to deal with on an 'as and when' basis.
What do I actually do now?
I have had a fairly formal and traditional upbringing in terms of my awareness of Art. Every tutor I have had(until now) has been a painter and all of them were older than 45. I began (as everyone does I suppose) with hard-nosed, old master, landscape painting and drawing at the age of 14. This venture was notably unsuccessful when I proved that I didn't have an innate drawing or painting talent. Combine that with my lack of effort and you've got a recipe for piles and piles of half-arsed mediocrity. At foundation level this changed when I was introduced to a wider array of techniques, processes and artists. I had preconceptions and negative attitudes based on unsubstantiated generalisations forcibly removed and most importantly, I was given no-where to hide. Laziness, bluff and pretense put aside there was a clear interest and passion in making surfaces out of paint.
To find a vehicle to hang the passion on to start with we went back to the basics, ultimately deciding on landscape as a subject matter because of how well it chimed with the process appealing to me. This being the idea of natural process. Erosion, waterfalls and stains led to the first large body of work I had ever undertaken seriously. I produced 4x6ft unstretched canvases and applied very thin paint in strips across the top, allowing the paint to run freely down the loosely hung fabric. I'll have to apologise for the lack of images but I have no photographs or camera at the moment with which to take any. I was basically given a book on a female painter who painted waterfalls in the same way (god will strike me down if my tutor doesn't first for me not remembering her name, perhaps you could put a comment in with who you think it might be) and told to copy it and see if it was enough. At the time it was, but eventually there were other questions that I asked myself and other concerns were brought into the fray.
As it stands I have chopped the work straight down the middle so that one issue doesn't cloud the other. Perhaps later when I'm more equipped to deal with the complex issue that is beginning to show itself I shall, but until then, this is more than sufficient.
1: The notion of landscape from slightly more scientific point of view. I am particularly interested in identifying the processes that lead up to its formation and exploring the nature of how landscape is and can be represented/explored in a visual arts context and the light of this knowledge.
I am becoming an avid reader of as much scientific exploration of the physical world as I can get my hands on. This has had me seeing landscape in a very different light. I notice different things and a knowledge of the landscape as a result of many processes that I am gradually becoming more familiar with has prompted my own visual exploration of said results. In particular I have been experimenting with paints and what happens if I allow different types of paints to just sit together and/or slowly drain from a flat surface. The results show an uncanny resemblance to satellite photographs and top-down images of landscapes that, until I had done this work, I had never seen the likes of. For a specific reference to the kinds of landscapes and natural phenomena I mean I refer you to a book called Earthsong by Bernhard Edmaier.
A few details of one of the early pieces of work will help the comparison along (Links to larger images supplied below the smaller versions):
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v381/Ross1986/FIRST0.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v381/Ross1986/FIRST2.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v381/Ross1986/FIRST6.jpgFor this particular piece of work I took many (earthy for the base) colours and large quantities of watered down acrylic paint and applied it to a wet surface in a tray that had been almost waterproofed. I then applied other immiscible trade-paints and materials (gloss, emulsion, varnish and hammerite) to the mix before another massive helping of water. I left the tray on a bed of newspaper and allowed all excess to drain off and the work to dry. Large, graduated washes, trails of paint and archipelagos of solidified pigment remained as the water dissipated.
More recently I have taken a more rigorous approach to the notion of these works being experiments. I have set up series' of them and made sure that strict guidelines and conditions are adhered to. The most recent have been works on polythene sheets where all application of paint is done in the center of the material then allowed to move and dry based on whatever creases and dips exist in the loosely tacked surface. This still from one being hung vertically shows ravines and tracks of paint as it has fought its way out of the thicker substance and carved its own path wherever gravity has taken it.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v381/Ross1986/DSCF0260.jpg
I am now aware that as well as the idea of natural processes and essence of landscape, the cheesey, romantic in me won't let the aesthetic of a landscape alone in my head. This is most probably because of my pretentious, self-indulgent associations and feelings I get when reminded of being in the English countryside or just generally out and about surrounded by weather. Combine this with my penchant for hurling materials around, interest in the craft of painting and working in a raw way reminiscent of defacing a surface rather than creating one and you have the method with which I tackle the second issue. This being:
2: The point at which an image becomes a senseless flurry of marks and visa versa. Having begun reading about optics I was fascinated by the idea that sight is also governed massively by the other senses and that our brain is guessing most of what we see. The idea that our own eyes aren't giving a faithful, hard-nosed account of the physical world begs the observation of the complete ignorance of the media and other critics who decry a lot of modern painting confronting the idea.
I am trying to tackle this subject by simply digging in my heels and lurching on into the unknown. With the guiding hand of god knows how much history of painting and sculpture I am fairly confident that this exploration of my own, subjective (as opposed to the previous objective agenda) and idealised view of the world around me will yield some interesting results, all be it not immediately.
I think this has been enough of a read for one post. I'll add in the details of a drawing 'project' we have been given recently. The nasty, anti-establishment attitude that was written about earlier kicked in and I railed against the necessity of 'another poxy a-level-esque project' stating that I'd rather be doing the work and developing a practise. Its easy to forget that your tutors aren't imbeciles and that their decades of experience in teaching and making a point add in to the things they ask you to do. They've told me to imitate some of Piranesi's ink drawings as they feel it will ground me a little. Fair enough so far, I'm enjoying the challenge of using a dip-pen and having to imitate a style.
Stay tuned and tell me of any bad blogging habits I may have, I'm new to this.
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