Anne MacLeod       497519

Drawing2               Assignment 3

Overall Comments
This is an exploratory set of work. The exercises are radical and demand much of you. They are designed to make you leave ideas like technical expertise behind and to examine process as well as physicality and gesture. Sometimes students find this difficult or even silly, but you’ve embraced the work and pushed at each exercise to find out what they can offer.
There needs to be more analysis of what’s going on, but you’re getting there.
Feedback  on assignment  Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity 
Thesis a difficult assignment but you’ve approached it with ambition and purpose. Well done. The intensity of the drawings is good. You say after the third image on the blog that you felt you were ‘getting somewhere’. This is what want you to expand on. Where are you getting? What are the clues? Which bits of the work are really working? Is it the process or the outcome? Try and ask yourself ‘why?’ whenever you make a claim and find a way of backing it up. If necessary make comparisons between your works to make your point. If you’re feeling ambitious compare your work to that of others. I’d be interested to see you write about Twombly or Pollock after making these.
As the work progresses (And it’s good that you’ve kept at this and produced a lot of work) you’ve tried to collide abstraction and figuration in the ‘tree’ works. By the end you seem quite in control of the processes (good) but there are consequently fewer surprises.
The photographs of the details have potential. What is their status? (remember the digital / analogue or ‘in the flesh’ conversation we had?) Are these works in their own right or just documentation of some thing else? It would be good to read your thoughts on this sort of issue. It starts to get at something fundamental about this body of work.: where is the work?  Is it the process, the object, or somewhere in between?
The answer might be that it skips around, never quite settling.

Projects Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Demonstration of Creativity 
Drawing Blind: These are good – especially the two lyrical black pen ones – and you’ve made progress. It would be good to see some of this approach filtering in to your normal practice. It harnesses a new way of perceiving, less based on ‘seeing’ or what you know already. Defamiliarisation is quite a common approach to making at the moment and it stems from exercises like this. It’s good that you linked these to Nicholson, but I’d like to see the link explored more. It’s not just a superficial visual similarity, but something that deals fundamentally with the nature of the object in question. It gets at big ideas like truth and beauty.
Mark Making: Throughout this exercise you move neatly from drawings that are simple observations to something more intriguing and well done for thinking of the parallel project while working on them.
The roses end up giving you a strong patterned work that borders on abstraction while referencing calligraphy / writing. Well done.
The drawing following the roses is intriguing. I like the ambiguity of the space and the way to recedes and flattens the subject. It starts to reads as a landscape but then suddenly snaps to being an interior detail. More please. This could be the first step in an interesting journey. Think about how the different areas can be amplified (that is, detail becomes very detailed and large blank areas become very black or flat), anyhow scale might play a part in this kind of work. I can imagine this as the basis of a giant painting.
The ‘blue spot’ drawing is good, too. I like that you have to improvise and use lots of small pieces of charcoal. This is what a studio practice does: it pushes you to make things by engaging with difficulty to find solutions rather than freezing or waiting until conditions are perfect.
Your analysis of this work is based the making and not on what the work might evoke or ‘mean’. Try and speculate a bit on that,
Drawing Machine: It’s good that you kept working at this until you doing that altering the variables made a difference to what was produced. By sticking with this you’ve inserted some deliberate authorship into what might seem to be accidental. Making hand made version os them was a good move, too as it should help you incorporate some of the marks into your vocabulary. Perhaps gridding up one of the charcoal drawings and making a facsimile of, but painstakingly done, would be an interesting way to extend / collapse time.
An Emotional Response: I’m not sure that these work as well, but I like the approach It would be good to think of the works as having the statements as their titles. I don’t normally suggest that students worry about making ‘art’ or anything ‘meaningful’, but you might want to start pairing text with the visuals. Don’t try be poetic or even descriptive, but perhaps simply explain something a bit. Have a think. It might feed into your Parallel Project, especially if you pursue abstraction. The rupture or juxtaposition of plain words next to complex imagery can be interesting. Perhaps the text could even become part of the imagery.
By the way, I think the first attempt at a self-portrait is interesting as the face is nearly blank and reminiscent of John Bellany’s work.
Learning Logs or Blogs/Critical essays  Context 
This is, again, clear and well-thought out and, with regard to others artists’ work, very thorough. As before I’d like to see a bit more reflection on the effectiveness of the work (yours and others) and not just a technical description or appraisal. It’s a subtle difference, but it should help you situate the work in terms of your ambition for it.
Plotting your work in relation to that of others (that is ‘contextualising’ it) is crucial. It’s what you get marks for, after all. You’ve come to some interesting and insightful conclusions in the ‘research / reflection’ part of the blog. It would be good to see some of that shown in amongst your own work.
For instance, when you made the video did you feel you were documenting a performance?
Try and apply this sort of thinking to what you’re doing a little bit more.
On the ‘Erased DeKooning’ (which I love, by the way) you say that
Interestingly, I was more excited by the assertion from Rauschenberg that if de Kooning hadn’t been home, then ‘that would have been the work’, and then if he hadn’t agreed to giving him a drawing, ‘that would have been the work, and so on. That is a very interesting concept to me, and somehow I can understand it better that the erasure of the drawing.
I want to read about why you thought that would be interesting. It touches on a lot of Conceptual Art practice (inspired in part by Rauschenberg’s gesture).
On the whole the blog is very good. It would be good to see some ‘bleed’ between reflection on the work of others and your own work. You’re doing it, but I need to see it in writing.

Suggested reading/viewing  Context
On the whole this is fine. You visit galleries and write well about artists and their work.
If you become interested in process based work, have a look online at conceptual art from the 1960s and 70s. The stuff that gets called conceptual art these days isn’t really.  Start at the Wikipedia page and spread out from there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_art
There’s a really good book in the excellent ‘art and ideas’ series by Tony Godfrey called Conceptual Art and published by Phaidon. A good library may have it. I don’t think you make this kind of work but some of your comments make me think you could apply some of the approaches within a more ‘hand-made’ context.
I can’t see anything (aside from the blue pot work’) from your parallel project. If I’ve missed it, send me a direct link, and I’ll add something to this report. I couldn’t see a specific section on the blog.
Pointers for the next assignment

• Keep your open mind open. It’s serving you well and there’s a palpable sense of someone discovering stuff through doing. Keep it up.

• Keep asking yourself ‘why?’ • Think how you can use work you’ve already made as raw material for the next section. This will add complexity to the submission and show that you can edit and select stuff that is rich.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with

Bryan Eccleshall  23/10/15

Next Assignment due Dec 2015