Mid-Session Review Art Project

Rather scarily this is the half-way point in first year!  We return to a short two week project in which we are invited to do the following:

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.” Susan Sontag

You are asked to revisit one project from Semester 1. Look at your research and the work you produced. (Don’t use the last project you did; the more temporal distance between you and your work the better.) What does the thing you made actually do? Does it accurately sum up your thinking? Does it make you see your original idea in a different way?

Using your original research combined with your current thinking, make a piece of work. You have two weeks to produce something new that will be exhibited in your space on Friday 21st January.

I have decided to return to the So Far project.  Steve Hunter had advised me in his evaluation to:  ' ...find more contemporary painters to help place your work in context. John Virtue for instance paints cityscapes that contain the weight and 'dirtiness' of the buildings he is looking at. Different from what you were doing here but his free use of materials might be something you could use. '

I looked up John Virtue and loved his work. An image of his is below. His work really reminds me of the smokey, black and white paintings of trains in the 'Railway Inn in Largo which I always sit and admire.  Steve Hunter had also commented: 'Your ideas are strong and that can make it hard sometimes to let go and explore equally thoroughly through materials. I only found this out late when I was at College. I think I was trying to 'illustrate' my ideas rather than understanding that the materials were a way of thinking too.'

I am very excited about getting back into the theme of the close, exploring things more through material use. At the end of last topic I got into using monochrome so aim to use collage materials and stick to a simple colour palette.