Oh wow! where to start??!
I feel it's really important to look back over this year as every time I reflect on a specific body of time I really see what I've learned. I'm not sure I can whittle down year 1 into a succinct post though!
There are some questions that I kind of knew I had at the start of the year which I feel I've now answered which is a huge milestone!
What is an artistic practise?
How do you apply research into other artists to your own work?
How do you know if your work is improving rather than just changing?
I've had a huge lightbulb moment with regards to the artistic practice question, the final icing on the cake was presenting 'my practise' as a whole to the GCSE students at a local school. It is something I've been grasping at throughout the year, gradually getting to grips with it and now I feel I finally have something resembling an understanding. It's a concept which was introduced to me right at the start of my FDAD studies at West Dean in September 2018 but I always felt awkward about it, like it didn't really apply to me and I wasn't enough of an artist to have a 'practise'. I was still learning so it was a term that didn't apply to me. Speaking to others on the course is so helpful, as I know that I'm not the only one who feels like I'm sometimes flailing around, not quite knowing what I'm doing or what I'm making, but that this is actually a valid part of being an artist. I'm very good at sounding an awful lot more confident than I feel a lot of the time which is why it's lovely to have this place to be uncertain in. Every now and then someone on the course says something that suggests I'm 'a successful artist' and I realised it takes me by complete surprise that other artists might see me that way. I think once I've completed this MA I might have to finally admit to myself that I'm not new to art any more, that I've been putting in a lot of hours over the past 5 years and that I might have made up for not having a BA in fine art.
Writing the research paper as well as keeping my nose firmly in art books and programmes etc. for the last 18 months is starting to pay off in term of understanding why delving into other artists ideas and practises is so important for my own. I've been pondering the idea of doing an A Level in History of Art, for a while, I think I'd find it really interesting and it would fill in some blanks in my art education. I don't know whether it's even possible but I'm certainly really enjoying learning more about artists and seeing how their ideas might influence my thinking and therefore my work.
Both the previous ideas influence the final question. Is my artwork improving? Another student recently posted an image from the beginning of the MA next to a more recent one and the change in her work is remarkable. You can see they're by the same artist but the second image is just so much more sophisticated. It made me wonder about my work over the course of the year. Has my work become more sophisticated? I'm not sure it has. I've definitely become more sophisticated in my thinking, but I think the making has a little way to go to catch up. I'm still experimenting. I think there is the potential for a whole series of slightly different 'things', still with print at the heart, but pursing the hanging/bundles/other things I've been hinting at. I'm wondering if I'm in danger of casting the net too wide in what I want to try to do but I somehow feel that I'm not quite there with 'my style' yet. I'm still not quite making work that I want to have on my wall. The nearest I get is the bundles and the little series of things rather than the editioned prints so I don't quite know why I stick to making the editioned prints. Probably because if you call yourself a printmaker then that's what you do. I do like making editioned prints too, I just want to do other things as well and finding the balance between the slightly different things I want to make is tricky.
I'm interested that I've just had a print accepted for the WCPF 2023 and it's the huge one I made last summer, just before starting the MA. I offered them a recent etching and the linocut of the pond made with caustic soda (thinking that would be the one they'd take if any) but they went for the most expensive and biggest one. Looking at it slightly shrewdly I wonder if it's because it's the most sellable? Who knows? I know my sunset ones do sell, they're always the ones I have most enquiries about as they sell out. I decided to limit myself to one sunset print per year and I think I might do another big one this summer. I want to try using caustic soda and possibly adding some mono-printing to it. i was never very happy with the cutting on the trees in this one. I also think it's a challenge to try and make it new and fresh, I want to come up with a new way of representing it. That feels like a exciting challenge! (And if repetition is ok for Cézanne....!)
