Fine Art Blog

 

According to Paul Weiner in "Navigating the art world Professional practice for the early career artist" (2020, p29) the emerging art audience is changing. He conducted a poll on his Instagram account asking what the art world looks like today for emerging artists online, with about 400 respondents for each question. He stated "Polling for this piece revealed 94% of the audience wanted to see real exhibitions by the artists who they follow online, 79% see more art online than in person, and 57% think the art they find online is as important as what they see in person. With this online audience growing rapidly, massive image-quality improvements on the horizon, and a digital-native generation coming of age, a significant shift is in progress towards accepting the virtual as real." I have struggled with accepting the digital shift that has been imposed on us due to the pandemic because nothing will compare to face to face interaction and the impact of larger pieces of...

Discovering the work of Heather Hansen has helped me understand the feeling of seeing the energy released into the charcoal marks I have been creating. She explored the combined art of painting and movement for one of her experimental projects titled Emptied Gestures, where the artist uses her own body to illustrate action on a two-dimensional surface in a kinetic performance piece. She contorts her body in fluid motions with her extended limbs trailing two pieces of charcoal that track their own movement onto the large surface of paper beneath her to create symmetrical patterns reminiscent of the Rorschach test. Her captivating performances involve dance-like movements that are just as much the main focus as the final drawings. These movements are captured by a photographer to document the progression in the piece, step by step, as static images encapsulating the energy exerted into each mark. In 2013, Hansen says, “In this series, I am searching for ways to download my movement direc...

I have recently started a conscious dance course called "The Art of Becoming" that is a form of movement medicine to work through some emotions and settle in the uncertainty of life at the moment. I hope that by releasing some of the shame and shyness that I have been holding onto for so long, I will be able to express myself to the fullest most authentic way possible during my performative drawings. ‘This is a time of radical uncertainty, we do not yet know if we are midwives bringing a new world to birth, or hospice workers to a dying planet. The process of being with someone who's dying and the process of attending a birth have many features in common. We can only be grateful for this moment, this breath, this incredible capacity to direct our attention. Whatever happens, this can be a moment of unparalleled awakening. We have a sense of what it means for an individual to wake up. For the collective to awaken, we cannot even imagine what it will be like. The evolutiona...

I was sent this artist by Babs Smith after she saw my drawings on Instagram and was totally gripped by Naomi Kendrick's view on the nature of drawing. I adore her Drawing made under Hypnosis piece and the expressiveness of the charcoal marks spiralling across the paper. I feel the movement in her work and the marks take on an energy of their own as they form a 3-dimensional illusion of a rotating abstract form. In this blog post Naomi Kendrick talks about trying to make visible the inner world that we all inhabit. I find the way she talks about rhythm and sensations really inspiring. When I am creating my line dance drawings I am not particularly focused on the marks that I am making, in fact, some dances I draw entirely while watching someone else dance it and mimicking their feet with my hands holding the pens. Those drawings are less about the unconscious driving the energy and more about making visible the invisible energy pattern that our feet create on a dancefloor.  I have r...

I got lots of recommendations in the feedback from my programme day talk so I collated and reflected on the list here.   Labanotation - style of dance step notation I had never heard of Labanotation before Brendan suggested I look into is as contextual research for my line dance drawings. Its incredible to me how Rudolf Laban created such a complex and versatile language that is simplified to blocks with different shapes and shading. After reading further into the symbols I understood how complicated it actually was and didn't spend too much longer trying to understand it. This image was a good reference point as a key to reading some of the notations. Labanotation or Kinetography Laban is a notation system for recording and analyzing human movement that was derived from the work of Rudolf Laban who described it in Schrifttanz (“Written Dance”) in 1928. His initial work has been further developed by Ann Hutchinson Guest and others, and is used as a type of dance notation in o...

I would love to do something like this with a dancer. I realised in one of the weekly line dance classes that I could draw out the marks of the steps on the whiteboard while staring at the steps that Barry was demonstrating in front of me without once looking down at the markings and still achieve a clear motif of the routine, so could experiment with that while Barry performs them next to me. I don't know if I could draw it full scale because I am better on a small scale, but worth adding to the ideas list.  I also thought about my conscious dancing when watching this video and wanted to play around with that idea now that I had received my large roll of paper. In the description of the video Jaanika Peerna explained that in this 2012 performance  "Drawings become movement and movement becomes a new drawing again. " Inspired by this I wanted to create a full scale charcoal drawing  in response to the words spoken during a 2h30min session of the conscious dance zoom cours...