Questioning why and how I do art.

For this post I just want to take some time to question why I do art. Why do I draw? Why do I feel the need to produce lines and forms on paper. For many others, my peers, they started to enjoy art at a young age. Yet, I didn’t really get into art until my late teens. I had previously done art but never enjoyed it due to the fact it was always being judged from parents to teachers and too other peers. It is like when you tell someone to do something while they have already started to do it; it makes you no longer want to do it. Why? I think it is the child inside that does that. Some feel to be an artist you still need to have that childish side of you to produce ‘good’ work.

I feel this is what challenges me within this project. I like to draw for myself than for other people. I like to draw because just the movement relaxes me. I am a very patient person so when I use processes like tracing, etching and simple line drawings and messy sketches have always appealed to me. As long as I do not compare the piece to other peers, I find I can enjoy the process. Yet, I do not like the outcomes. (maybe this could develop into unfinished drawings that show my impatience to making the drawings look good due to the fact they are unfinished meaning the outcome doesn’t have to me good).

Although this questioning does lead me to- what is a ‘good’ piece of art? Is it when some one has a specific theme running throughout a series? Is it the when someone sticks to their own style?

I find it hard to develop my style of work so if I did go and stick with unfinished pieces of work should that be stopping me from developing and challenging myself. Obviously, I need to brush up on my research by talking about artists from the documentary and book of ‘ways of seeing’.

I find it challenging to use processes involving a craft element where you have to create something with 3D . It gets confusing as making work through sculptures and marks on the ground like Richard Long. “Takes drawing into sculpture and draws with fragments of nature”. (ways of seeing ep. 1) takes a lot of skill to see the outcome. It is also due to the fact I get distracted by the process itself as I end up comparing the piece.

So maybe process should be the focus. Looking into etching and repeating. Tracing over that to create something new by taking out sections of that drawing. Making a collage of these.

Again. I come up with many ideas then start it but then I do not develop it further. I struggle with  theme and making sense of what my ideas even are.

The ‘100’

Today we were given the brief for this term which was about questioning how I approach drawing and how the perception of drawing had changed. It will help me understand why we use drawing to communicate.

First we had a discussion on what we did over the summer for our 100 drawings. As I stuck to being monochrome and simply observational my results in comparison to my peers were lacking a style.

We then went on to develop our drawings to change the scale by making a viewfinder.

We then enlarged a section of our drawing that we found interesting which was challenging as my drawings was not very complex. This meant that once enlarged from the viewfinder the results were rather abstract.

We then used ink to redraw the selected part into a A3 drawing. I found it hard to stay with my theme as we was not observing anything yet I feel that a change of theme would be good for this project. I can still use observational drawing as a way of documentation yet not as a single theme for my series of works I will be creating. I enjoyed being able to step back from my theme and create these ink drawings and see how they changed.

Then we selected drawings for display and arrangement. We looked at how the light and dark imagery should contrast together and they all showed a different story linking me to the theme of narrative.

From here I used my scraps of paper to recreate my drawings into a more abstract outcome.

Ext. Diploma in Graphic Arts

To start this term off we were given a task to complete over the summer. This involved 100 monochrome drawings with a theme of your choice. I decided to choose the theme ‘observation’ as it is something I love to do and would be doing a lot of it over the holidays. The way people act in situations has always been an interest of mine as well as psychology which is a possible direction for research. I found out there was different types of people- ones that sit by the pool and read, others listen to  music, others that stand by watching people, some are in the pool just swimming and the ones that play water-polo and other games in the water. This task was challenging due to having to question my style of drawing and to understand my reasoning for choosing to observe these people.

I originally wanted to do typography alongside my drawings but felt the task was challenging enough. I struggled to make my drawings diverse so during it I thought about doing my project based on objects we use on holiday, yet that didn’t have enough meaning to me.

From group discussion I found that I view drawing very negatively due to not being great at drawing which I felt is the reason my 100 drawings look mainly rushed and sketched. My drawings were mainly either line drawings or detailed drawings so they looked very similar to eachother. Due to working monochrome I used ink, pencil, charcoal, water colour and sharpie.  I found that ink was the best media to use to achieve the best results due to being able to change the tone and how it can be unpredictable depending on the brush. Also, I tried to use different materials and as I was on holiday there was always napkins available which made some results unpredictable due depending on the media used.