12 July 2017. Experiencing a large number of forced breaks from outside my course is definitely not good for making and analysing progress. The design of Understanding Painting Media, as I mentioned in my Assignment 1 tutor feedback reflection post (Lacher-Bryk, 2017a), appears to me to require more deep immersion than I experienced in either Drawing 1 and Painting 1 and starting to write up the work done in Part 2 up to now feels like trying to pick up pieces distributed over a large area. This post will definitely be a life-saver to get me back on track …
My tutor had a look at my feedback reflection post and advised me not to be scared. This may have been the single most useful hint I have received in a long time and it made me look at what I am and do at the moment. If someone had asked me directly, I would have answered that of course I am not scared, but getting the advice in written format I had the time to think about it and I realized that my tutor is 100% correct with her observation. I am scared. This relates to the things happening outside the course, which require an overwhelming amount of courage and stamina, and have been doing so continuously for a decade now (since the 17th of July 2007, the day our younger son was born, to be precise). I realized that I may, as it is now, not have enough courage left for my course to allow me to act with confidence. I am determined, however, to turn things around to make this fear work for me as a developing artist rather than against me. Will see what happens :o).
So, back to my preparations.
After having been told to research artists, who either paint collections or paint with unusual materials (Lacher-Bryk, 2017b) – a combination I thought odd, to be honest, we were to use everyday objects to lay out and photograph our own collections. These were then to serve as basis for the four exercises making up Part 2.
I produced the following collections:
Fig. 1. Two versions of “white on white”
Figure 2. Silver cutlery from my great-grandmother’s restaurant in Slovenia
Figure 3. Pencil patterns on fleece jacket
Figure 4. Pub crawl
Figure 5. After church talk
Figure 6. Soup cube tilings
Figure 7. Socks, sunbathing
Figure 8. Necklaces and stuff I never wear
Figure 9. Toiletries and the sorting power of the written word
Figure 10. Shoes – Lisa Milroy way
Figure 11. Orderly collections of keys …
Figure 12. … and less orderly ones
Figure 13. Testing the effects of sorting a collection of photos
13 July 2017. My first-time experience of getting acquainted with the inner laws of collection-making saw a slow start even with the examples by several artists in mind (Lacher-Bryk, 2017b). Despite the attractive arrangements I had been unable to feel a true connection with their work, but it was, predictably, different with the objects familiar to me. When looking at the above results (Fig. 1-13) I feel that I prefer those collections, which appear to have a strong sort of communication going on among the individual objects, e.g. the bowls (Fig. 5), which remind me of groups of people standing and talking “after church” or another community event. It took me a while to find working arrangements and it was interesting to identify some laws which make them work. Basically, it was an impression of having an object’s focus turned towards or away from the group. This was probably easiest to see in the sets of keys (Fig. 12). The laying out caused the immediate creation of an invisible but nevertheless perceptible network of attraction and repulsion effects. The strongest of these radiated from, in my opinion, the set of identical simple silvery door keys with the red tag at the top centre of the photo on the right. When I look at it, the set of keys seems to exert an attractive force on all objects surrounding it, pulling them towards the upper edge and eventually out of the frame. It is probably those effects, which make artists examine the properties of collections in the first place, because they can lay the foundations for telling a powerful painted story. At the moment I am quite overwhelmed with the possibilities and so I decided to keep matters simple with the set of exercises for this part of the course.
Since my tutor also informed me that the main purpose of experimenting with a large range of media is there to eliminate those media I am not happy working with, I see the course in a completely different light now. I will thus try and be as sensitive as possible regarding my reactions when using certain media and then select those I am happiest with. This is something that appears to occur anyway, but only now am I aware of the fact that this is what I am supposed to do. Which makes me feel a lot less scared.
References
Lacher-Bryk, A. (2017a) Tutor Feedback and Reflection [blog] [online]. Andrea’s OCA blog: Understanding Painting Media, 29 June. Available from: https://andreabrykocapainting1upm.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/assignment-1-tutor-feedback-and-reflection/ [Accessed 12 July 2017]
Lacher-Bryk, A. (2017b) Research Point: Collections and Unusual Materials
[blog] [online]. Andrea’s OCA blog: Understanding Painting Media, 27 May. Available from: https://andreabrykocapainting1upm.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/research-point-collections-and-unusual-materials/ [Accessed 12 July 2017]
ANDREA's OCA BLOG: Understanding Painting Media 