Student name Anne McLeod

Student number 497519

Drawing 2 Assignment number 6
Type of tutorial (eg video/audio/
written) Skype

Formative feedback
Overall Comments
This is your last Drawing Two report. Congratulations on completing the course. It’s not easy and you’ve applied yourself well to a challenging set of circumstances. I believe that you know think of art in a different way and – as you have said – are more open to accepting different approaches in how art works are made. Well done.
This report acts as a summary of your experience of the course. You have supplied notes based on our video conversation. An edited version of these notes are here are in black and have been supplemented in red. The report bis plot into the Parallel Project, Critical Review (and you also have my notes on that document), some notes on submission and a summary. I haven’t included all your notes as we repeated our selves a bit. However your notes are good and all are relevant.
Parallel Project
Demonstration of technical and Visual Skills, Quality of Outcome, Demonstration of Creativity
Bryan […] asked how I felt the step up from D1 to D2 had gone. I’m still out with my comfort zone, but felt I made a bit of progress towards the end. Discussed processes, taking photos first then sketchbook work. Bryan said he thought it really worked, he liked the text that I’d written, work that I’d done; the way it starts off very technical then becomes satirical. It has a measure of control, as a piece of writing it sets the stage for the rest. There is an interesting density to the drawings and the monochrome works. The first piece with the drawing of the people in the cubicles is actually a really nice piece of drawing. You have incorporated hand drawn elements. I explained the collograph print process I’d used to avoid the drawing becoming too tight. Bryan liked that I’d thought about the process. He liked the face. He liked it all. The dots give it a texture and continuity running through it, it unifies it. He really liked the ‘abstracty’ one with the tight crosshatching and the repeated text, it just seems like a really strong page design. It reminded him of Philip Guston.

This was based entirely on the look of one page, but it’s good to follow up visual similarities. Huston also made work that accompanied poems, showing how images can work with text without being illustrations. He thought I’d made a really interesting document, he liked that I’d challenged myself, he liked that I’m still not sure, I’ve persisted with it but still not sure, that shows it has a power to change me. I may decide never to try this type of work again, but ‘I’ve kicked open some doors). I agreed that I have started to look at things differently. Bryan said that no matter what happens next, the course has worked, artists notice stuff that other people don’t notice, and make connections that other people don’t see, and make work out of it. I’m connecting the patterns in the office with the people I meet and the difficult protocols I need to work with. I’ve shown humanity, respect and honour the people I meet, not pity, but appreciating there is a difficulty and monotony and recognise that these people are stuck, but I’m also saying ‘I’m stuck here too, I’m stuck in the same bureaucratic system you are, a common cause, prisoner/jailer scenario – a system. Bryan asked if I had shown colleagues, which I haven’t, I said because I don’t think they would have understood what I was trying to do, I wouldn’t have understood it a couple of years ago, Bryan thought that was interesting and it shows I’m learning.
Using ‘authentic’ documents, or logos from work, grounds it in truth, the closer I get to making my book look like the documents I work with; the more effective it will be. I said I was going to put it on the noticeboard at work and take photographs of it. Bryan liked this – it’s anarchic. Assessors would like to see this, it’s following through as much as you can. Bryan recommended when submitting for assessment, I put it in an A4 envelope, marked for assessor’s eyes only, this cannot be reproduced, it can’t be circulated, I could use a grid envelope as this pushes it a little bit further, but make the situation absolutely clear. […] Bryan thinks it is a really strong piece of work, I’ve used drawing, alluded to painting; it is reminiscent of the work of Sigmar Polke, who used a lot of layering and pattern, and screens. He likes the post it notes, it has something quite interesting going on, I’ve come up with something challenging, it has roots in observation. It’s evident that you are now ‘getting’ the work as a process of looking and connecting more clearly than when you started. That’s a huge shift in your understanding of how art is made and where it comes from. It also accounts for how art looks. Your ‘book’ is neither a description or a representation of something and any narrative it has is complicated. This is a huge step from the requirements of Drawing One and shows how far you’ve travelled. Well done.

Critical Review  See also notes on the script.
The Artist as a Recorder: Bryan thought I’d struck on something. My observations on use of ‘authentic’ material and ephemera….if I want more space I could edit Erased de Kooning out, look at including Blake in the conclusion. Interested in my use of the word ‘authentic’, he knows that I mean material that is particularly pertinent to the subject, the material is actually the subject, for example Cornelia Parker’s Venom and Antidote, the material is as relevant as the drawing. I need to explain my use of the word ‘authentic’, I could put a foot note in, not the definition from the dictionary, but my meaning, and then when I use it throughout the essay, use quotes to show it’s my use of the word, and to explain that I don’t think that where ‘authentic’ material isn’t used, that it is fake. It is important to highlight this as I’m making an important observation. This relates the final piece for the Parallel Project.
He likes that I’ve looked at other artists differently, for example Peter Blake, I see him as recording something, Hamilton’s collage, I’ve made him think differently about it, looking back at it now in 2016, it was a vision of the future, we see it now as cute and retro, but it’s still futuristic, it does this collapsing of time, he is looking at it differently now, I’ve shown him lots of things – ‘I like it when students teach me things’. True. You have uncovered a way of looking at artists that is particular to you and even though you are likely to remove some from the Critical Review, that doesn’t mean they stop being relevant. Through your writing you have found a ‘lens’ through which to look at artists and their work which feeds into your practice.
Submission Advice

I need a paper and digital copy (email word document) of the Critical Review, check on line for current assessment rules. Numbers are guidelines, you can be over, discernment is important. Look at Criteria. My book shows creativity, I’m setting myself difficult things to do. My work shows technical and visual skills, e.g. paperclip drawing, relevant to office environment. Quality of outcome can be demonstrated in my blog where I post lots of stuff. Discernment is knowing what your best work is, knowing the best elements in the work to expand on, – I’ve stuck at something that’s difficult, I made work in an environment that is hostile, which forced to work and respond in a certain way, I’ve responded in a way that’s surprised myself – be very explicit in my learning log about how far I think I’ve travelled – when I started I thought I would be doing this …, look at what I’ve done now, I now understand …, make it absolutely crystal clear in a final statement on the course, as it’s a nice thing for assessors to read, they can’t read everything but they read the last post at the end to see what you think you’ve learned.
I asked about the Mind Map and Contextual Statement. This could be a reflection on my course, ‘reflection on the course’, where I started, ‘ As I now prepare my portfolio, I look back and realise how different the work is from the beginning at the end, say why you think that is, what you’ve become interested in…a lot of students would be afraid of making a piece like this because they think it will stop them from being able to draw in a conventional way, but it doesn’t and suddenly you can bring in that drawing skill into a new frame. It needn’t be a long statement, just something readable, unpretentious and straight forward, and if there is a moment when it clicked into place, for example the Alistair Gray portrait, I connected with it, suddenly it wasn’t just a portrait, it helped me connect with the subject of the painting or something in myself. You can start the statement with this moment, it doesn’t need to be chronological….I saw this painting and it really clarified things for me…because when I started I thought I was going to be doing…I had to do a lot of work and then narrow it down and focus on one thing and that helped produce some really solid stuff.
A mind map is useful to show how interconnected everything is, how to artists relate and how do paintings relate, but it isn’t essential to do one.
There isn’t much to add to what you’ve noted down here, except to reiterate that being very clear is important. Don’t write in a pretentious or ‘arty’ way. Write about what has happened to you and your work and explain how that change has come about.

Summary
● Well done on completing the course and with engaging so completely with it.
● The Parallel Project shows me that you can think in an interesting way and be bold in how you make work, even if this is a one-off piece. It seems like a ‘site-specific’ work in that it responds directly to the restrictions under which it was made.
● The Critical Review feels like the beginning of a practice. You have, I think laid the
foundation for a way of thinking about the production of art and your place in that
process.
If you need to run anything by me before submission, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Bryan Eccleshall
Date 4th September 2016