Welcome to my first blog post! My name is Gemma. I am a visual artist specialising in painting and drawing. I am a 2020 Fine Art Graduate from Hull.
In this introductory post, I have decided to look critically at my most recent work, and how my upcoming project is going to build on these skills. Reflecting on my most recent work is important because it allows me to progress both creatively and develop further skills in other aspects of my practice.
As my most recent project was done during my Fine Art degree, I was able to build a body of work that showed the development of my skills, particularly in painting and drawing. My project explored the connection between memories and place. This led me to the creation of a project around gardening, allotments and specifically sheds. As I had grown up gardening with my family, particularly my dad and grandad, I consider our allotment an important place from my childhood. During my project I depicted all of the handmade structures that my grandad and his friends once had in their current state, and from photographs from when they were alive. I looked at the structures both internally and externally in my chosen mediums. I found this project to be the biggest test of my skills to date because I was focusing exclusively on my drawing and painting skills. In previous projects I would take the mixed media approach, and touch on multiple mediums that I was interested in to make the body of work expansive and diverse. This time, I decided that focusing on my ability to draw and paint, developing those skills and seeing how each piece of work improved would be a better approach. Changing my approach to the project allowed me to focus directly on my abilities in drawing and painting, and I feel that the outcome of the body of work as a whole showed this. However, due to COVID-19 and the closure of the college, much of the work created was done at home. This severely hindered the project because I was limited to certain materials, scale and a lack of peer to peer advice. All of these aspects left areas of my project under-explored, and limited my work. Furthermore, things such as a planned installation to accompany my work and my workshop programme was no longer possible.
During my most recent project, I began drawing in new ways, using fine liner pen rather than pencil, something which I didn't explore at length previously. Prior to this, I would use pen sparingly, mostly when drawing from observation. Challenging myself to find ways to draw accurately in pen was one of my aims of the last project that I feel I accomplished. Through developing my mark making skills, and better understanding my choice of medium I was able to create accurate, detailed representations of each shed I selected. I believe that the drawings improved gradually, along with me increasing the size of the pieces, stopping at around A2/A1 size. I think that the drawings showed a high level of intricacy, and depicted each shed's personality well, regardless of me working from observation or photograph. The use of the pen allowed me to explore a scratchier medium that heavily relies on mark making rather than a wide tonal range, which graphite drawing has. Instead, I was working with a higher contrast medium that heavily depended on accurate line work to create detail and depth.
During this exploration of fine liner, I researched artists who where similar on multiple aspects of their practice; in their subject matter, medium choice and also similar in the use of mark making. One of those artists was Allisson Moffett, a visual artist who also looks at sheds. Although Moffett drew in pencil, I was still able to find similarities in the general process of our practices. I think I was able to put my work in similar context to hers because of the similarities I was able to find. Most notably, the use of negative space throughout Moffett's work was something that first stood out to me because it appears in every piece she does. Similarly with my own, I removed the sheds from their landscape, putting them onto a blank background to make the shed the primary focus of the piece. Although Moffett used graphite, I found her method of mark making coupled with very smooth shading to be an interesting aspect of her work. It showed me that there was room to be more versatile with pencil and they could be easily translated into pen.
Upon reflection of the drawing aspect of my previous project, I think I could have explored working at a larger scale further. Although, due to COVID-19 I was severely limited throughout my most recent project on a variety of levels, I still think working at a larger scale would have developed my drawing abilities even further. I would have had to adapt my process to working over larger pla
nes, and further stretch my skills in drawing as a whole. If I had made my drawings life size, the overall experience of my work would have been far more immersive, simply because of the scale. Working to a larger scale will be an element for me to explore going forward.
Similarly with the painting aspect of my most recent project, I was painting the same sheds, but this time in colour. Doing both painting and drawing allowed me to develop skills in both areas to a standard I was very pleased with. I was able to capture the same sheds I had drawn in a different way, simply by changing the medium. My main aim from the project was to improve my painting skills, both in my colour mixing, theory and also my ability to capture a building/structure in its full likeness. Although one of my major drawbacks of the project was the inability to work to the scale I had initially intended, I was able to produce a series of 50cm x 50cm paintings that reflected the selected sheds well. Again, I feel working at a larger scale would have challenged my ability to paint, as I have never painted a very large piece. In the previous project I felt my most limited in my paintings. I believe this was the case because I didn't feel that I could stretch myself creatively as much because of the scale, and I didn't have as much emphasis on trying to build my practice in this area. Instead, I was trying to reflect the sheds in a different light to the drawin
gs, which I feel I did successfully. But, I think there are unresolved elements of both the paintings and drawings that I haven't fully experimented with yet. I think it forms a good starting point forgoing forward because there are many elements of my practice that I want to and feel I can experiment with under the same theme.
While doing this, I was also planning workshop content around my specialism in these areas with the aim of delivering it to a mixed-ability group of participants. Having my studio practice, which consisted of painting and drawing, I felt that my workshops had to consist of one or both of these mediums. With that in mind, I decided to plan a workshop around the concept of drawing from observation. In doing this, I would have had a group of students, ranging in abilities and ages, drawing a shed that I had designed/curated and put into the studios. Much like life drawing, the students would sit around the shed and respond to it through drawing. Later, the same shed would have been used as an installation at the degree show for viewers to draw inside and respond to in their own way. However, I was only able to plan this aspect of my project due to COVID-19. Although disappointing, I found a very strong interest in creating educational content. So much so that instead of delivering the workshop content physically, I changed the content into an activity pack so that people could enjoy the benefits of participating in an artist-run workshop but in the comfort of their own home. I found this aspect of the project to be an eye-opener on arts education. Through my research and issues surrounding conducting the workshop normally, I have both seen the clear downfalls in education as well as how difficult it can be as an artist to conduct workshops in education. But, it is something I will aim to pressure and develop in the future.
Looking forward, my newest project brings my practice and the want to deliver arts education together. My intentions for my new project will be to produce an online educational platform where I can provide arts education to all ages, beginning with secondary school students. This platform will have activity packs, written workshops and potentially video content showing people how to draw, use perspective and develop mark making techniques. My aim is to provide a platform that expands the UK curriculum, showing students key skills in drawing, something that is lacking in the UK curriculum today. This website will be based an emphasis on artistic skill and how to develop it. As the school curriculum's framework is based around an expectation that students have a certain understanding and ability of artistic practice, I want my platform to be a place where students can come and learn without pressure and to ignite an interest in both learning and art generally. Having done workshops in the past, I have seen the importance of artist to student interaction when trying to strike an interest in art. I think students become more engaged with being creative if they see a working professional run an educational activity for them to partake in. The idea behind the online platform long term would be to create a community of people, or even have schools use the platform to enrich their student's understanding specifically in painting and drawing.
The tasks that I aim to devise will be based around my current practice. This creates a direct connection to my work and my platform. It also allows me to teach what I know, rather than covering elements of art that I am less confident in. I intend to base the activity packs and workshops on the fundamentals of drawing and/or painting that I rely on the most; mark making, perspective and general accuracy skills try and pin-point the areas that generally need improving among students.
Overall, this new project allows me to continue with my own practice while expanding my ability to deliver workshop content in a virtual manner. I think this will challenge me in new ways, and allow me to experiment with how I teach. As well as this, I think my project following a similar theme to my last one will allow me to experiment other areas of my ideas as well as try working in ways I wasn't able to previously. I intend to document more details about my project through my blog going forward, having specific posts on the basis of my educational platform, research, work I have been creating and anything else that inspires my current work.
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