First year of university studies (Printed Textiles and Surface Pattern Design BA (Hons)). First critical journal entry. Let’s go! Firstly I’d like to outline my broadest goals for this year:
- Tackle anxiety in an academic context
- Not be a perfectionist!
- Show up to everything
- Develop a somewhat clear ‘design direction’
- Have fun 🙂
Seems fairly manageable. The current brief is centered around ‘The Fifties’ and much of my preliminary research has been focused on shape, line and sculpture. Through this, and through examining slopes and planes, form and shadow, positive and negative space, structure and texture, I decided this initial research would lend itself well to the theme of architecture. I’ve been researching into general movements of the 50’s, as well as architecture at the time, architecture in the present day (primarily in Leeds) and a range of contemporary and historical sculpture. Through drawing workshops I’ve identified a gestural style that I’d like to take further. For a while, I was drawing almost exclusively with my left hand and as I refined the art of moving the pencil to where it wanted to go with some degree of accuracy, the still-shaky quality of line became something rather aesthetically pleasing. I can see this technique lending itself well to the creation of textural backgrounds, or else a stylised form of figurative drawing.
I also think there’s an appealing contrast in the concept of an imprecise, gestural drawing style being used to depict subject matter like architecture. Buildings strike me as quite contradictory in a sense – all those precise angles and measurements, concrete mathematics, coming together with rough, uneven textures in the wear and tear of materials used for the building itself. I want to capture something of this contradiction by rendering these works of architecture in a rough, uneven hand.
Using left-handed drawing I’ve created observational drawings of my still-life composition, studies of sculptures at the Hepworth Gallery and the Gego exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, and created my own sculpture to further inspire visual research.
Although very basic, this sculpture has actually given me some great visuals; by drawing on a very zoomed-in scale, I was able to pick up a lot of patterns in the texture of the paint, foil and corrugated card, as well as the deliberate triangles, lines and curves I had cut out.
I have also come up with a palette of marks using mark-making techniques. Inspired by Lucienne Day and the unique textured backgrounds of her work, I have tried to develop these further through the use of collage. I think mark-making is a highly effective way to add texture to a piece and can be applied as a light background layer or to fill in a shape, and the technique itself is highly versatile. To add to the development of texture I’ve been working with a range of mediums – graphite, charcoal, marker pens, ballpoint pens, fine liners, etc. I like that each gives such a different line quality which can be varied even further through applying pressure, holding the drawing utensil at a different angle, and so on and so forth. I think these turned out well for the most part, and particularly liked some of the gestural, continuous lines created with fine-liner pen.
Through fortunate accident, some of my mark-making experiments resulted in pieces similar to John Piper’s landscape works, and this is something I intend to develop further, having a vested personal interested in Surrealism and unusual portrayals of people and places. My work has begun to take an abstract direction as I have played with scale and developed drawings of close-ups of sculptures and buildings which breaks them down to their most simple forms, resulting in interesting patterns of line and shape. This also ties in to the abstract forms and patterns of Fifties post-war design, and moves away from florals which I usually gravitate toward! One thing I’m currently unsure of is my colour ways. I’ve been inspired by the vibrant colours in John Piper’s paintings (particularly Emlynn, near Newcastle) and so am considering incorporating similar oranges, reds and blues into my work. I think  these will also be reflective of the brighter, more saturated colours coming into use in the Fifties post-war era, which would tie my work back to the brief.
On a personal note, I am feeling rather anxious. At this stage there are clear objectives – printed lengths of fabric, a finished sketchbook and technical file to hand in at the end of the module – and my outcomes are still uncertain. As someone with a history of anxiety and chronic perfectionism, this becomes the most difficult part of the project. Where to go from here? Are my designs good enough? Am I still happy with my chosen theme (probably not)? The sheer dread of potential failure can be – and has been, in the past – utterly paralysing. At this stage in proceedings, I always like to recall a quote from Ira Glass, one that underpins not only my design and writing philosophies, but my approach to life in general. It’s about trying, and success coming through doing and hard work, and it reminds me not to get to get caught up in the traps set by my self-critical brain.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
And on that note… back to the studio!
A Critical Journal. 