15/5/13

The Idea Of Taking Orders - Reading Material

Read:
Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre (discusses autonomy, responsibility for own behaviour)

To Read:
The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart (not making one's own decisions)

Peter Doig, Concrete Cabin II, 1992

After I painted a couple of things based on the photo I posted yesterday, I was told to look for a certain Peter Doig painting - I think probably this one. It contains a similar idea of a building and trees almost meshing together to form one grid pattern. The way I see it, it touches on the idea of buildings affecting an atmosphere, which is reflected by the way the patterns formed by the building (rigid lines, grids) seem to extend pass the building, or at least are not contained.

The Importance Of Low Quality Camera-Phone Photos

Lights "inspire" me, whatever that means, and I appreciate the ability to instantly capture atmospheres. I consider the low quality comparable to the "warmth" we're supposed to appreciate in vinyl records and Polaroid photos, despite phone photos obviously being digital and not analogue... it's still fuzziness.

I've painted some atmospheric things based on this. Might paint more.

Next Year

The best thing would probably be to bring my work to a suitable pausing point in the next month or so, leaving the summer for freer, unrelated work which will help me to see if my interests have changed.

An idea that has developed out of my current work is to take orders from someone for a while and see where that goes. That is what I'll start next year with, and I'll think of it as a fresh starting point, so it feels uncomplicated and less stressful.

Approaching The End Of The Year, I Think

I seem to have built up a list of ideas that have just been sitting on my "To Do" list for a while, some for months. Most for months, actually. This is essentially because I feel that my priority should be fresh ideas whether they are entirely spontaneous or grow naturally out of existing work. In the interest of moving forwards with my work, I think I should go through this list of ideas and figure out which I can do relatively soon, and which have valid reasons why they have not yet come into fruition.

1. It seems like ages ago that I was thinking about art created by people who don't consider themselves "artists" (for example people who are "left-brained," people who are fairly adamant that they "can't draw" and are probably right, and people who have no interest in art) in comparison to art created by art students and professional artists and such. I was interested in questioning the idea that an "artist's" concepts mattered more. One way I was thinking about doing that was to take a doodle created by a "non-artist" friend and invest time and skill into it, treating it as being a lot more important than it was to the draw-er originally. I had ideas of ways to immortalise the drawing such as carving it into stone or tattoo-ing it somewhere, but I decided that it would say more to develop it in some way using traditional skill in a time-consuming way, like making it really elaborate somehow. However, this idea remains vague in my head.

2. Linked to these themes was the idea of creating something traditionally skillful and time-consuming and asking one of these people who don't consider themselves artists to "finish" the piece, putting all of the control over this product of invested skill and time into their hands. I could potentially do this if I decide on a suitable medium for the original piece - for example, if I used oil paint I probably couldn't guarantee that it would be clear that I put time and effort into the painting... Maybe the concept relies too heavily on the assumption that I have any level of artistic "skill," and would probably communicate the opposite of what I intended (as in, it might appear to be making a point regarding contrast between the skill level of an "artist" and a "non-artist," which would be especially laughable if the contrast was barely there).

3. I created some exaggerated happy visuals that were both sincere and sarcastic simultaneously, which reflected what was going on in my head (childlike idealisation of life, in general, that was either genuine or ironic and I wasn't sure which). I also started thinking about people's tendency to oversimplify other people's problems ("Cheer up!" "Oh, okay then, I guess I will! Thank you for that advice!" - a conversation that has never happened). An idea that grew out of both those things, and out of some other stuff I was doing at the time, was to get other people to choose objects from their rooms and I would either make a sculpture or drawing that idealised their life in an irritating glitter-rainbow-unicorn way. I started making a sculpture like this (a pink, glittery castle made of beer bottles, essentially), and also created a cheerful flying-pigs-and-rainbows drawing based on someone else's chosen set of objects. Neither of those things particularly worked visually: the sculpture because of technical issues and the drawing because it was essentially an experiment with a more refined, illustrative style that heavily depended on a well-planned composition. I could potentially come back to these ideas later (especially since they are not quite as simple and literal as I am making them sound, and thus may be vaguely worthwhile), but for now I feel like the themes in my work are different.