College week 9/3 Art History 8th November

This afternoon we had a session with Jo on how to tackle our essay assignment.  The task is

• to select an artist or designer who has particularly influenced you in this year, and to analyse the characteristics of their work and evaluate it relevance to your own work.

This caused me some trepidation as I have not yet decided on an artist and I have been feeling increasingly lost about my own work and where I am going.  A very unsettling peer review session yesterday (too painful for me to write about, it all felt horrid) didn't help so today I felt rather exposed having to talk to the whole group about my plans.

So I skulked about hoping not to be noticed, but Jo caught me in the end.  I came clean and said I did not yet know who to focus on, because I did not yet know what pathway I was going to go down, nor what kind of work I was going to produce for my two pathway projects.  But that I had been much interested in modern colourists - Tony Cragg, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, Anish Kapoor (see yesterday's post).  I might choose one of them.

In fact, I have begun thinking about colour as a theme for my project work, and also about abstract expressionism and minimalism.  I am interested in simple process drawing and painting, about repetition and simple shapes, and about bold colour.

Not sure how this will work into my pathway projects of which we have to do two by mid- January, in theory 4 college weeks for each one but Christmas gives us a little extra time.  The topics we've been given to choose from are:

• My Imaginary Friend
• Site/place/map
• Tales of the Unexpected
• I Am A Camera
• Weather
• Protection
• Ceremony
• Writing/Word

Initial favourites are Site/Place/Map and Writing/Word but I will play around with them for a few more days before choosing the first.