The Backstory –
Tuesday the 4th of October was a really exciting day for me because it was the first day of my MA studying Fine Art Digital. I met a number of fellow students online and we had some interesting conversations. Part of the course requires us to keep a blog – a journal of our creative journeys. I’ve had experience of creating blogs in WordPress and I’ve even run a basic WordPress workshop. However I am by no means an expert, so for this reason I was quite torn about my approach to this.
I had two options – either I could start my MA blog from scratch, or I could repurpose an existing blog. I decided to choose the former. My thinking was that art is a creative journey and I’m just about to embark on some new travels. However, what I have already produced has ultimately led me to this point so I’m Adding a ‘backstory’ to help the viewer/reader understand my thinking. Where I have been creatively and where I am headed may be a good starting point. Below is a short video of an art book I created in order to pull together the best images from the past couple of years.
I also have a long history of reflecting on my work and actively disliking it as my creative knowledge increases, therefore a fresh start that draws on past experience seems to be a good way forward. Below is a short video opener showing the culmination of my work spanning the last couple of years. I was working with the medium of oil on water. I was investigating how materials that typically repelled each other could become quite beautiful with the addition of light. It was a way of finding beauty in substances that did not mix. This to me became a metaphor for our increasingly divided society. People with opposing views often both repel and repulse each other. My question was could they possibly produce something beautiful together with the addition of light. Where light stands for enlightenment. I like to think so.
Looking at my empty site right now, all I can say is that I’m really looking forward to seeing it evolve! I feel that previously I achieved what I set out to do, which was, in the words of Dorothea Lange – ‘pick a theme and work it to death, the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate’.
The subject I loved was oil on water mixed with light. To me there was something really magical about this medium – indeed I was so fascinated by it I shot literally thousands of images of it. The colour map below is a snap shots of my camera roll where all of the individual images have been reduced down in size. Each colour pixel within the colour mosaic blocks is actually an image. This in itself paints a picture. Indeed, some months I was working with blue tones and some months warmer red tones. I appear to have covered much of the colour spectrum!
I certainly do feel it’s time to move on and evolve!
