Today I have been reflecting.... asking questions about the new pathway and journey that is now unfolding before me, after the last 5 years of studying, which included three years of an Arts and Humanities Fine Art degree at UCS.
The course consisted of three main aspects the deep experimentation of mediums such as paint, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and drawing, these have enabled and allowed me to understand the importance of the multiplicity of mediums and their value as tools, or more so as vehicle's through which to express or communicate a message or an idea visually, on a given
subject or project undertaken.
Connected with the above was the contextualising of artists studied - whom have both inspired and influenced my own development along with the academic side - the on going grasping of historical and contemporary art theory which was instrumental in enabling my thought processes to develop for the discipline and articulation of essay writing.
The personal development gained from all three areas means I am now in the process of cultivating all I have learnt into this new chapter that is about to begin... as I said in my previous blog, a process of distilling has now begun as a time of reflection and questions...
Questions such as;
What direction shall my work take ?
What is my favoured medium?
How do I find a way forward ?
Do I want my work to be commercial?(in other words just as commodity) or is there a deeper reason - a message behind the work?
What kind of artist am I?
AND Am I really an artist?? after all what is an artist?!! Ahh yes now then there's good starting point, well I suppose I could start by answering the last question first, after this story....
A few years ago I was in a gallery and out of the blue a man asked me "what are you"? slightly taken back by the question at the time my immediate thought was, I am a person yet simultaneously I was aware this would not have been the kind of answer he was after...we got talking, but I never did answer his question..."what are you" ? !
For some reason the impact of that question and my reaction ( or invisible internal response) has stayed with me. At the essence of my being I am a person and from that trait - as a person I experience, respond to and have a desire to understand and communicate with the world around me.
As for identifying myself as an artist my first thought - response is remembering Joseph Beuys view that, 'everyone is an artist'... So in a nutshell what is an artist?
Thesaurus definition; Artist is a creator, maker, craftsman, Artistic is creative, cultured. original, sensitive, expressive... so this probably does include the whole human race ! CREATIVE seems to be the key - we all have an ability to create.
As a person I respond to quotes (as you will notice peppered throughout my blog) I find them inspirational, I hope they become in someway an inspiration to others too.
Communication via words, poetry, quotes, songs, text, etc is so essential to understanding the world and can enable other forms of art to be explored and communicated, sometimes they are the key to unlocking creativity in others... so thank you poets, writers, and musicians!
I have experienced this sense of unlocking, happening in my own work, particularly now technical skills and researching have become a factor in enabling me to communicate visually my response to a given situation.
My natural inclination in communicating lies in the visual arts. By working with varied mediums in order to express my response to a given situation.
In his book Relational Aesthetics, Nicholas Bourriaud says, "the artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him... he catches the world on the move... he is a tenant of culture." This quote resonates, as the artist does respond visually to the world around him, it's what S/he knows, and what is perceived in each new generation. It's experiences that motivate, stimulate, and therefore create an emergence into visual expression.
Artist Robert Henri says "The object isn't to make art, it's that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. "
This speaks to me as ones response to the world... the way that art expresses and communicates ( a point) through a variety of mediums I use, such as photography-photoshop, sculpture, mixed media, exploration of materials, drawing, paint, printmaking... I am in no hurry, I know for me that it's a life long journey and I am comfortable with, after all to quote Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." It's the journey that counts as without it there would be no end result.
