This statement reflects on how my art production and the thinking behind it have interacted and developed during the course of this module of study.
The reason I paint is rooted in two facts:
For this module of study, I completed numerous experiments, trials and practices with paint and other media. These led to my final composite piece, which highlights how understandings (plural) - each partial and probably conflicting - coexist in our making sense of the world.
In an attempt to hold on to one nearby landscape view, I unthinkingly resorted to a range of techniques to record its various elements. Tonal sketches, flowing brushstrokes, precise drawings. Becoming aware of this, I thought to combine several idioms in a linked work, supposing that no single approach was adequate to the task. Hence 'The Edge of Town'.
However, despite its figurative appearance, this finished piece is more conceptual in its ambition than is obvious.
In my pictures, I chose different types of representation to accord with those I would most naturally lean to for the five separate parts they contain. Yet where these parts butt against each other there are tensions. This is hardly to be wondered at. No more than when the edges of my several understandings of the world (commonsense, religious, scientific, superstitious, rational, gendered, Western, White British...) rub up against each other. It's equally unsurprising that the resolution of the frictions in the paintings is as incomplete as the integration of the components of my world view. The upshot of this is that our take on things - as remarkable an achievement as it undoubtedly is for each of us - cannot be a 'world view' (singular), with its implied lack of ambiguity.
And yet regardless of this clever justification for the appearance of my pictures, the extent to which their frictions remain is a measure of their failure. I want the pieces of my pictures to sing together, just as I hope to achieve a harmonious life (there's no harmony in a single voice). But where I have fallen short, I hope at least to have failed well.
- There is something not nothing
- I know this.
For this module of study, I completed numerous experiments, trials and practices with paint and other media. These led to my final composite piece, which highlights how understandings (plural) - each partial and probably conflicting - coexist in our making sense of the world.
In an attempt to hold on to one nearby landscape view, I unthinkingly resorted to a range of techniques to record its various elements. Tonal sketches, flowing brushstrokes, precise drawings. Becoming aware of this, I thought to combine several idioms in a linked work, supposing that no single approach was adequate to the task. Hence 'The Edge of Town'.
However, despite its figurative appearance, this finished piece is more conceptual in its ambition than is obvious.
In my pictures, I chose different types of representation to accord with those I would most naturally lean to for the five separate parts they contain. Yet where these parts butt against each other there are tensions. This is hardly to be wondered at. No more than when the edges of my several understandings of the world (commonsense, religious, scientific, superstitious, rational, gendered, Western, White British...) rub up against each other. It's equally unsurprising that the resolution of the frictions in the paintings is as incomplete as the integration of the components of my world view. The upshot of this is that our take on things - as remarkable an achievement as it undoubtedly is for each of us - cannot be a 'world view' (singular), with its implied lack of ambiguity.
And yet regardless of this clever justification for the appearance of my pictures, the extent to which their frictions remain is a measure of their failure. I want the pieces of my pictures to sing together, just as I hope to achieve a harmonious life (there's no harmony in a single voice). But where I have fallen short, I hope at least to have failed well.