Creating Confusion

After a couple of months of not really creating anything (I had 4 years worth of DIY to catch up on!) My first task is to create some art for the walls of our living room, but I got sidetracked yesterday with these blocks....  Mmmm which way up should they be?

Which way is up....

Here we have a shot at the Queen's Garden Party at Holyrood Palace from last month. We didn't actually see the Queen, so I Photoshopped her in to complete the picture!

This was a brief break in my post-college pondering.... After 4 years of having deadlines to meet, all of a sudden it was over and I had no deadlines - it really messed with my head. So I've spent the last few weeks catching up with 4 years of household DIY and putting a ton of paperwork into some kind of order.

It turned out to be good to have a short break from art, as I'm now itching to get creative again.

To kick this off I have now started to do a daily "Blip" - something that got me into college 4 years ago. Here's my page: https://www.blipfoto.com/Bikechef

Bikechef came about as an anonymous username due to the fact I cycled a lot and used to be a chef!

Collage - The Best Bits Year 4

Honors year - how did I get here so fast!

The tables turned this year and instead of being given briefs to follow, we had to choose our own brief and present this as a proposal. This was also dissertation year!

I had already chosen my dissertation topic and this was based on the influence of Saul Bass, who changed the face of graphic design, movie titles and posters, and so much more in the mid-twentieth century.

Some of Saul Bass' movie poster designs....

I chose an overall topic for the more practical elements of the year, which was the journey of Saint Mungo from Culross to Glasgow in the 6th century. Much of my previous work involved journeys in one form or another, so after becoming intrigued by how Mungo, who was born in Culross, ended up becoming the patron Saint of Glasgow, I decided to walk this journey myself.

After much research, different historical accounts held different views of the actual route that Mungo walked from Culross to Glasgow. So I turned to old maps and mapped the possible route myself using the Roman roads that would have been around at the time. 

Here are a few photos from that journey....

The artwork produced from these wanderings took the form of a sculpture and a book of photographs.

At every mile of the journey, I took 10 random photos. I processed these photos into a single image by superimposing all 10 over each other. This resulted in 50 abstracted photos, each representing the mood and feeling of its specific location on the journey. 

Here's a sample of the photos....

The resulting book looked like this....

I wanted people to experience this journey symbolically, so I chose a spiral shape for the sculptural piece. Spirals were popular in ancient times and were used in Roman carvings, and other Christian and Celtic stone carvings. The piece had to be big enough to walk into, and a spiral would draw people in.

I worked with the GPS elevation and distance data of the walk and decided to create the structure from 4 x 4inch wooden posts.

Each post represents one-sixth of a mile of the walk, and the height of each post represents the elevation above sea level at that point.

An aerial view from the upper floors of the college

Two views of the final structure on the 2nd floor college patio.

Collage - The Best Bits Year 3

Into the degree year now and things stepped up a gear! The previous 12-week block format changed and things felt a bit more serious.

To kick off we were asked to consider creating something with a hidden meaning. I had been looking at work by Paul Klee and decided to do a watercolour

The piece spells out the first line of Amazing Grace.

Next was Visual Language, a 3 part exploration of specific themes. 

The first brief was "Self Portrait" which could be approached from any artistic angle. I started off by creating doodles of faces....

But soon realised I didn't want to be as literal with the topic. I recalled a memory from school and created a narrative around this....

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Narrative

As a child, I was once given a set of crayons which included an amazing (at the time) turquoise colour. Up to this point, all the pencils or crayons I had been given were primary or secondary colours, and this inclusion of intermediate tertiary colours was a revelation. I can still transport myself back to that time and recall the feeling I had seeing and using these coloured crayons. 

Turquoise became my favourite colour and, unknown to me at the time, a kind of artistic identity.

Some years later I was at High School, and the teacher asked us in turn to state our favourite colour. This wasn't in an Art class. If I recall correctly it was an English class. At this time I was already being bullied and had become quite withdrawn, and when it came to my turn I naively said "turquoise". The class erupted in laughter, and I hoped the ground would open and swallow me up. 

My artistic identity had been violated, I felt I had to conform, and partly due to this I didn't take art at school. I vowed that I would in future just say my favourite colour was blue.

It took some years to regain my artistic identity. And college was the final chapter in this restoration. Finally, I can now say out loud that my favourite colour is turquoise again.

My Artistic Response

I started off by painting a board turquoise to represent my initial love of the colour, I took care in mixing this colour and found a pleasure in seeing the colour being applied to the board. This was a representation of my Primary school years where turquoise imprinted its hues into my life experience.

I then painted over this with primary, secondary colours and black & white to represent the violation of my like for the colour; a covering up of who I was. I felt myself applying this paint with almost anger, and I applied the colour with brutal strokes over the canvas,  Only a few gaps of my colour were left. This represented the violation/crushing of my identity. I became a different person, I felt I had to conform to the views of the crowd. My true-self was covered up, with only small glimpses of who I was.

Finally, I painted over these colours with turquoise again to represent the regaining of my identity, and rejection of the conformity that had been imposed on me. I admit I felt an elation as this final coat was being applied.

The final piece, although completely one colour, bears the marks of the previous brush strokes, and has faint glimpses of the colours underneath. This adds to the interest of the piece and emulates the scars to my own identity which will always be there, but now add to the completeness of my journey.

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Brief 2 was "The Book". Again this could be interpreted in any way, but I decided to create an actual book.

I decided to develop the doodles I had started for the previous brief, and base these on my classmates. I asked them all to tell me their favourite colour, and I doodled each person in the same Picasso-esque style. 

As part of my research, I looked at an artist book by Ed Ruscha called 26 Gasoline Stations, and modelled my book on this:

Brief 3 was "The Stranger" and I again recalled a past memory where I was a stranger. The narrative this time was as follows:

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I was a shy 12-year-old English kid who had landed in the middle of Ayrshire. The memory linked to this work is of locals trying to get me to repeat the phrase:
"IT’S A BRAW BRICHT MOONLICHT NICHT THE NICHT"

It was obviously a bit of fun for them, and I don't think they meant any malice in the request.
However, the result was that it made me feel very alienated, self-conscious and that I didn't fit in.

My response in this artwork is a protest to this incident and rebellion against the impact it had on my life at the time. NO IT ISN’T a moonlight night tonight!

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Creative Processes ran through the year with part 1 up to Christmas and part 2 continuing in the New Year.

The college building that we studied in was due to close at the end of the academic year and we were to move to a brand new "super-campus". The brief was to research and develop work around the transition between the two buildings.

I concentrated on the fact that the existing building, which originally was the College of Building and Printing, was a Listed building, and found out that some of the old print presses were also Listed. Also, two of these print presses were not able to be migrated to the new building so I decided that I should try and migrate these artistically.

I homed in on the print press buttons; tiny buttons with hieroglyphic style symbols. I replicated these using many different media

Part 2, and I started to investigate a more 3D approach with glass

Finally I created digital acrylics which were mounted on perspex

The final module of the year was "Appropriation" where we had to take something existing and make it our own.

I chose a map of Glasgow City Centre and initially painted the studio wall with the roads and river to create an abstract grid.

I decided that this needed to come off the wall and be a 3D piece, so I created the grid in MDF. This time I painted it black so that what it was wouldn't be too obvious. I called it Blythswood to The Barras, which taken on a diagonal was the area covered.

Collage - The Best Bits Year 2

Things started to get all conceptual in the 2nd year, kicking off with Psychogeography: "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

Our mission was to choose a circular geographic route on a map, walk it, and create art from it. I chose a route around Glasgow City Centre. This fed into many works over the following months.

44 Doors:

This is a result of 44 photographs of city centre doors superimposed over each other.



Some collages of collages, from my city centre circuit





More city centre images used in a projection workshop. Using myself as the projection screen





Drawing machines:
Wind powered.... by the open window and using a desk fan

One drawing, left overnight by the window, got rained on, which added to the design



The drawing truck 

- this travelled on 4 wheels and was pulled with a bungee cord! I walked around Glasgow City Centre with this and drew some strange looks!



I produced 5 "drawings" using a charcoal ball, a pastel ball, a chalk cradle, a felt pen cradle, and rolling paint sample pots



The finished "drawings" were wrapped into cylinders and suspended.
The final work became "5 Walks Around Glasgow City Centre"



The "Sphere of Consumerism"
Made from rolled Argos catalogue pages!




The Lightbox - featuring 44 Doors

Look out Andy Goldsworthy!......

Mirrors for a video module....

Image manipulation following the projection workshop

Computer city with model railway figures, and shape shifting plastic from the laptop screen!

Developmental Drawing - or Developing Mental Drawings....