Fight the Good Fight

I have been studying Visual Communications for five years through a distance learning college. I started studying photography in 2010 and I realized I wasn’t a photographer after a year of study. I realized very quickly there was this large demographic of technically minded males who dominated the industry. I was far more interested in Man Ray and dark room techniques. I also had the rumblings of some internal discomfort with photography and the digital age. Everyone has the ability to take a fairly rubbish photo and make it look better. For example; I could take a very dull picture of a fried egg and use the Photoshop to alter the exposure, contrast and highlights and then I add a filter, I suddenly turn my fried egg, into a misty hazy retro fried egg that every body loves and I get a million ‘likes’ and then I decide to call myself a professional photographer. Don’t get me wrong, I love photography but there was a part of me that didn’t want to follow the path so I stopped.

I moved onto illustration and I thought I’d found myself. I love narrative and I love drawing so Illustration was the one for me. I did enjoy the course but there was a fight going on inside myself, I could hear the distant shouts of me, myself and I having a good old scrap.  I did get a good mark in my assessment but it wasn’t enough. I then tried graphic design. I got a bit confused and focused more on illustration than layout and by the end of it I was tired. I handed my work in for assessment and while I was waiting I stated my own work.

I have a lovely friend who has been doing the same course as me and we meet up and talk about our work. We generally come away feeling motivated. One particular time we were looking through our private sketchbooks and we said ‘Why are we spending all our time crunching through this college stuff when what we love to do is our own stuff in our sketchbooks’.  We left each other with much to think about.

I now acknowledge that within myself, I have the need for validation. I’m not the only human to feel this way and a University degree would have indeed armed me with the tools to call myself an artist. I have been looking after my large family for years and I really had a deep urge to claim something for myself. The fruits of my education would have been mine and mine alone and I really wanted to prove myself. However, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it and it hurt.

Inside myself was the recognition that I had missed my boat and no matter how hard I tried I would never get it back. I would hate going back to University full time. I would hate being with hundreds of eighteen year old students experimenting with their creative freedom, while I would be sitting in the corner stressing about missing a call from school saying one of my kids was ill or how the dog was feeling or thinking about my enormous ironing pile. I would also really struggle with some student who thought they were the next ‘big thing’, as they displayed their diamanté-encrusted sausage on a white mdf plinth. I would also resist any form of tuition from someone whose work was unsubstantial. You see, if you tell me your name I will Google you and look at your work and if its shite I wont listen to you!

I couldn’t do distance learning and it took me five years of total slog to realize the format was just not right for my head. I have reading difficulties and the whole damn course is based around bloody reading. It was a total fight and I thought the fight was my artistic journey and that ‘every artist has this battle’. But it wasn’t that, it was that I wasn’t reading the coursework properly and I was basically doing what I wanted to do, but when it came down to it, I was missing the point of the assignments.

For six weeks I really pondered why I had the need to formalize my learning. I had to look long and hard at my life and see what was right for me instead of this formalized pathway to my education.

I just started making images of the things that interested me. I started to teach myself how to oil paint. I also started drawing again like I hadn’t done since my A levels. I am watching so many YouTube videos to help me understand and I am watching documentaries about art history and techniques. I am processing lots of information and it’s going into my head too. The more I do, the more confident I am that I don’t need a degree to learn, I don’t need letters after my name to be an artist.

It is still hard work, its still a struggle but the fight is a good fight. It’s one that I get joy from. Its one I don’t mind loosing every now and again because I know I’m learning and improving.

I was watching an interview with Grayson Perry and he was talking about how art schools are really important places because of all the support around you, to help you with your work and direct your learning. It’s a huge support network or specialists and fellow students that will help you improve. (Maybe that is a little bit idealized but I get his point.)

I realized when I watched this that I won’t have this support network on my self-taught journey. I do worry about my work not going in the right direction because of my isolation. I may spend years on one project only to discover that it made no sense to anyone but me. That’s not what I want. I realize I may have to create some kind of core system that will help me evaluate my direction objectively. I have also created a time sheet to document my hours spent working. Not to quantify my time in monetary terms, but to measure progress and learning and how many hours it takes me to nail painting in glacises or how long it takes me to complete a drawing. It helps me measure my progression. I am also doing short classes in life drawing; this is because not many people I know want to get their kit off for me to draw.

My friend and I were once pretending we went to a ‘Fantasy Art College’ (Like Fantasy football but with art) We were laughing about how she was a punk in her room bunking lessons and I was having relations with Picasso who was our teacher. It was funny as we sent emails to each other about what was happening to us in this Fantasy art college. To be honest… I’m kind of their now. I’m being taught by Picasso, Monet and Di Vinci and the mighty Caravaggio. I watch documentaries and learn about their work and history, I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. In closing I would like to share something Leonardo Di Vinci said: ‘I know I’m not a man of letters. Experience is my one-true mistress and I will sight her in all cases. Only through experimentation can we truly know anything’.

I notice that he doesn’t lay honor at the feet of those who taught him from being a small boy, he pays tribute to experience and say’s he will ‘site her in all cases’. He understood that our knowledge only really comes from doing the work.

Art and Fear

I have been listening to an audio book by David Bayles and Ted Orland called Art and Fear. I really enjoyed it and I found it very enlightening about my own work and how I should pursue it further. A couple of quotes that helped me are:

'Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself'

'To require perfection is to invite paralysis'

Both these comments help me realise that my work should nourish me and I know I need to change my direction so I feel that nourishment. Also perfection... I think that requires a lot more thought on my part as I feel I have to decode myself regarding this matter.

My Empty Head

A few years ago I completed a black and white photography course learning how to use the dark room. Towards the end of that year I was experimenting with photograms (inspired by the Bauhaus as always) and I was using plasticine and card and other objects. Believe it or not some colours of plasticine are more translucent than others! I was feeling particularly frustrated by my role as a mother and my work was clearly showing this. I took a photo of my own head from above and I made a thick card silhouette of the outside of my head shape. I then left enough of my face to see some features. I made words out of plasticine and made a photogram with the words ‘My empty head’ inside my brain. This image has been kept in my box for years until now. 

I have been looking at Vintage feminist propaganda and I came across some really visually interesting but very sexist posters. Looking back at history really does show us how far we have come and how this would not be tolerated now, however, the feminist in me says we have further to go. I came across a poster of a woman’s head and inside it was all the things she thinks about like, babies and men and hats and busty dresses. Because that’s what we really think about…all the time. However I can’t see any chocolate in her head… a woman would have never left out chocolate - that’s all I have to say.

I could not believe the similarities of these two images. It seams a bit too unreal knowing that they are totally unrelated but very similar in design. The Vintage poster intends to make fun of the woman’s mind, whilst my image was produced out of my frustrations of being a mother. It has fascinated me more how our minds work when we produce similar design despite our differences in space and time.

Messing with Montage

Hannah Höch is a German born Dada artist whose photo montage is some of the best I’ve seen. I reflected on being a woman in the 1920’s and her amazing work. I found a quote from Hugo Ball saying ‘For us, art is not an end itself...but and opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in’. I liked that. However while reading about Hannah and the Dadaist I found it annoying that such free thinkers still expected Hannah to make the refreshments at their meetings. Hans Richter described Hoch’s contribution to the Dada movement as the “sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.”

Hannah’s work commonly combine’s male and female traits into one unified being. During this era "mannish women were both celebrated and castigated for breaking down traditional gender roles." Her androgynous characters may also have been related to her bisexuality and attraction to women. Many of her pieces challenge mass culture within the beauty industry, at the time gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Many of her political works from the Dada period supported women's liberation with social and political revolution. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973. Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination and the war.

Below are some of my experiment’s inspired by Höch. I got a bit carried away playing with these paper German dolls! I had a go at my own bit of photo montage and I got a book called The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Age by Silke Krohn. I think Hannah would have loved this book!

 This is my first real attempt at a montage. I really found the process cathartic.

Worth it's weight...

I don't really have a favorite colour but I do find gold very eye catching. It works really well as an accent colour to draw the eye. It does work well in a printed form as a point of interest on book covers. Here are a couple of my gold experiments. I used gold leaf, plastacine and Gill sans letterpress characters.

What is Pylongraphy?

As human being’s, we are hard wired to see familiar objects and shapes quickly. Anyone who has looked at the clouds and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth have felt the influence of Pareidolia! Paredolia is “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist”.

There are some interesting examples of this on the web, you can find photograph’s from people around the world who see faces in very unlikely places. There are images of Hilter’s face in a building, Mother Teresa as a Bagle and Mother Mary in a slice of cheesy toast. There are lots of funny digitally altered ones too.

Some scholars say its our evolutionary inclination for survival, to recognise familiar shapes quickly so we can respond to threatening situations more effectively and survive longer. Some say that our brains are constantly sifting through random lines, shapes, surfaces and colours. It makes sense of these images by assigning meaning to them - usually by matching them to something stored in long-term knowledge. Whatever the scientific reason may be - experiencing Pareidolia, is really quite cool.

Whilst researching this subject and seeing many examples of faces in the food stuffs and stains of the world, I began to wonder... If we can experience Pareidolia for faces or familiar shapes why can’t we experience the same thing for words? Could we not experience a typographic Pareidolia? So what is Pylongraphy? It’s nothing... I just made it up. However, I have been fascinated with Transmission Towers for a while. They are so very obvious and so invisible at the same time. I like to stand and look up and see what shapes I can see in their crisscross fret work. There are so many horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines that its impossible not to make geometric shapes whilst you stand under their tall outstretched wings. I photographed them and saw that I could make a whole nexus alphabet. The type has a very angular and irregular characteristic and the beauty is that there are many alternatives and options in what the letter’s can look like.

Pylongraphy may well be made up but so is the random cheese face that looks like Mother Mary. The reality is born when we give these things meaning. The lady who found cheesy Mother Mary now prints it on T-shirts. I look at Pylons and make typography. Our brains work in such an imaginary way and it would be interesting to see how many of our existing typographic beginnings have been born from “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist”. In the same way that a religious person may see a heavenly sign in a random smear on the underside of a marmite lid, so we, as designers, receive inspiration from the world around us and make things real.

Let us not inhibit our brains natural pathways in seeing things that are not really there. Let reason and logic be still, as we allow our minds to wonder the horizons of nonexistence.

Transmission Tower
Giant angels of steel across my landscape
Reaching the upper bounds of my horizon
Thin metal structures of perfect lattice
Electrified ribbons extending for miles
A nexus plexus of transmission power