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 At this time I was already being bullied and had become quite withdrawn, and when it came to my turn I naively said "turquoise".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:
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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!
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.
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