Away From The Flock

Well its all over for a week or two.  The work is submitted, the group dispersed after a drink at the pub round the corner.  Was I alone in feeling - Is That It?  But I guess that feeling of deflation is inevitable.  I, for one, and I suspect I'm not alone, am keenly awaiting the information with regard to the next assignment.  Of course we know roughly what's expected, the handbook tells us that, but one always has the feeling that the current info is needed before you start piling into the project.

I think I know what I want to do - but have sneeking feelings for one or two other ideas as well.  I am showing some prints in Germany in August and got quite a wry response to the idea that one of the pictures might be a sunset...  Its interesting how some subjects and treatments are so cliched that an honest response to them is virtually impossible?  I have looked at other work where what could easily be dismissed as hackneyed is lauded...  Context is o course everything I guess but nonetheless there are strange perspectives at work in the contemporary art environment.

Over and out

Thats it!  The project is complete...though I didn't quite make it with every one of my favoured subjects I did have thirteen from which to make the selection of ten.  Although I still feel dissatisfied - when is it otherwise? - I do think I've made quite a personal journey.  I now have some understanding of portraiture and a feeling for coherence in terms of a portfolio of images.  Some progress too with the use of equipment and processes that necessarily go with it.

I may even push on with the idea - not in terms of my studies on the MA, where I'm firmly thinking around landscape - but simply as a personal project.  Pushing onwards into other locations and subjects...who knows what might emerge from it.

For now though that blessed relief and euphoria when something is put to rest and one can move on!  This photograph is one of those that didn't make the final selection.

Steadying The Ship

I'm trying hard to keep some focus on my studies at a really difficult time.  I have taken a decision to leave my current role at the University of Derby and in part, at least, return to self-employment.  The upside of this ought to be more time to devote to my MA, the downside, for now, is that I'm working harder than ever.  There's just so much to do at present.  Yesterday however I did pull in two more sessions and so theoretically have enough material now to make a submission.  I am clinging onto the notion that focus in the essay will result from the production of the final images!  

Diversionary tactics

In trying to complete a task I'm a terrible prevaricator - added to which a variety of other pressures to get things done - and the project that has to be completed and handed in exactly two weeks today is still a way off.  I'm shooting more subjects this week...and trying to set up several more for next.  Leaving a few days to make the prints and the final selection...oh, and the small matter of an essay that still consists of 70% unedited notes.

Ah well...best not to worry or panic.  The materials for printing and submitting are now to hand.  There is at the least some clarity in the conception of the pictures and if I could just settle to it the essay should be relatively straightforward.  Though goodness knows what feedback I'll receive from the really rough draft I submitted last week.

So why was I in the painting studio this past Friday, Saturday, Sunday?  Because I needed to distance myself from the other - as well as complete the move from my previous space within the studio complex to the larger space I now inhabit.  I tend to work on a number of parallel themes/projects simultaneously and moving across allows me to do this more easily.  One project is a series of roughly 50x40 cms paintings on panels - entitled the 'Ivanhoe' series and each image (though they are entirely non-referential) named after a town/village/hamlet in North West Leicestershire - which used to style itself 'Ivanhoe Country' for tourism purposes!  This body of work had stalled in around 2006 when I had a period of enforced inactivity due to heart surgery and its only been this past weekend I've been able to stretch out and start work on these pictures again.  This one is no. 14 in the series (and its a bit weird that the project stalled at 13 images if you like that sort of coincidence!) - which place it will be named after is yet to be decided...

Deflation

Feeling strangely and unnaturally deflated today.  I ran out of road with the draft of the essay and had to leave a large section of 'untreated' notes at the heart of it - not that this matters especially at this stage.  But somehow I feel I'm falling short with the project as a whole with the text in such a state.  I am also keen to pull in at least four more sittings before finally deciding on the selection and sequence of prints.  At present there are eleven subjects - if I can make that 15 I can discard around a third in making the final group.  So all's well then except it seemed as if others had achieved clarity over the project as a whole and could in consequence have a near completed text...hence my discomfort...pitiful really!

I need to be a little more bullish about the pictures maybe.  Maybe, they arn't as incoherent as I suspect.  Only time will tell.  What I have discovered is that there is a reason that portraiture hasn't been on my radar previously...I simply don't have the passion for it.  My interests are in landscapes, increasingly local landscapes as well as more exotic ones (as in the accompanying picture to this entry), and our relationship to it.  In the past I'd thought this was simply because it informed my painting activity but I now feel it may be deeper than that.

Anyway - Cake File: this week a cornucopia of delights...cakes (lemon and chocolate), a lemon pie, apple pie and - although they were all nice - the highlight - scones and clotted cream with homemade jam - it must have been Daisy's doing!

Crunch Time

This morning is a real pinch point in my MA.  Today a draft of the essay to contextualize the practice project has to be submitted.  There is a collection of random thoughts and observations sitting on the very computer I'm typing this into but turning that into a coherent and meaningful commentary is really tough going.  I've advised quite a few of my PhD candidates to do this stuff but actually putting it into practice oneself!  The biggest bugbear is that the creative process doesn't lend itself to a conventional narrative nor to extensive textual analysis insofar as visual work is concerned.  This is I believe doubly the case in photography rather than painting, for example, because the actual moments of production, the point at which the shutter is clicked or the printer button pushed, i.e. the moment of decision taken is instantaneous.  Of course digitisation has drawn these practices closer together again...the use of photoshop alone, much less the technical advantages of RAW file manipulation, suggest something more akin to 'traditional' studio painting practice, but the decisions taken in the complex interaction between photographer, sitter and situation - constituting a deal of the 'content' are so critical to outcomes.

Of course this ought to be finding its way into the text I'm writing (it probably will as I'm using these posts as an aide memoire) but only if I get on with the job rather than using this as a diversion tactic!  Oh to be back in Athens on a fine spring evening with a cold glass of Retzina...

Out and about

Yesterday saw the opening of a clutch of new shows and Derby Museum & Art Gallery.  We went along and were particularly keen to see a selection of the Museum's landscapes mixed in with a small selection of work by local artists who focus on this subject matter.  Amongst the works were two pictures of Peak District landmarks by Nick Lockett who came along to talk to us last semester.  They looked extremely good - not least contrasted with some eighteen century topographical sketches (with annotations) of the Derbyshire Peak - in their own way both artists with a strong, almost obsessive, desire  to capture the detail in the peak albeit through very different means.  The whole show reminded me that, when push comes to shove, this is where my own passion in making art (be it paintings or photographs) lies and where I'm sure my major project will rest.

Nonetheless I'm now working with over twelve subjects in my current portrait project and have had my first request from someone to be added into the equation!  This chuffed me to bits!  I still lack any confidence in the photographs but feel I have to see it through as the project now...I've a text and a dozen pictures after all and there simply isn't time to change tack again.  So there it rests.  The picture today is of one of the most recent of the portrait shots.