Hello! Time to Catch Up

Hello,



Art Wall

This is my first entry to my blog and its a little late. I am starting this blog about half way through my coursework project for my A level Art. The purpose of this blog is to keep an up to date account of what I am doing in my project. It is going to be a place where I can organise and store my thoughts and progress. I am also accounting my work in three other ways, during the project I will be keeping a formal sketchbook for my idea and work at A2 scale, and an exhibition/artist sketchbook where I will account the exhibitions I have been to and which artists I have taken interest in at A5 scale. I have also been given a wall to stick thoughts images and work up on as a visual aid for my ideas, this will be constantly changing as it will be somewhere for me to place my ideas.
I started my project with a personal investigation. As I am someone who finds value in sentimental memoirs such as letters and photographs I decided to look at my diaries from the last four years for inspiration. Each diary differs in its own way and as a collective they show progression in personality and a sense of maturing. The diaries made me think about mark making and writing down thoughts, at each moment the things written in these diaries were of some significance yet looking at them now I can hardly remember why I wrote them. The diaries lead me to look at the artist Dieter Roth, an artist who works with collected items. I will write a single blog entry on him later on.

I had lots of ideas when I started my project and I found it hard to narrow my ideas down to one key concept so I explored different aspects of what I wanted to do.

Firstly: Firstly I looked at mark making and doodles, and how I had scribbled and drawn all over different parts of my diaries, I found the marks interesting and briefly explored the different progressions with my marks.

Secondly: Secondly I looked at the theme of time and progression and general development. How things change over time. I looked at a sequence of cover I found in the telegraph magazine which helped me explore this idea. Looking at common themes that still develop over time. Things that keep one principle idea but are always changing and progressing.

Finally: (the chosen idea) Finally I looked at the theme of layering and collectives, how each page made up one diary and how each diary made up another idea. I wanted to make something out of nothing. This is an idea that I really explored, I focussed in on the idea of making insignificant items have some significance, and changing and developing them in to whole pieces. I decided to focus on this idea and leave the other two ideas behind to come back to for inspiration or movement if I needed them in my project.

Collage

I explored my chosen idea with collage. I started by choosing sections/pages and inserts from the different diaries and layering them on top of each other and using a simple collaging technique to create a two dimensional piece. The piece came out looking really interesting. The colours that came from some of the sections had washed across the piece and some of the images became distorted, the most interesting aspect of the collage was the way in which you could see parts of pages coming through underneath other parts where I had layered them. I decided to use this collage for a screen print. I will write a blog on the screen printing process later on. The screen-prints looked really interesting and lead me to look at an artists called Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg uses newspaper pages and found documents to create powerful collage pieces. The screen-printing process lead me to take off in the project. I decided I wanted to create a drawing of the collage and perhaps print onto the works. By using layering I would work back on to the pages of the diaries with the screen printed images of the diaries. Layering and collaborating different parts.

Next Steps:

• Create a drawing of the interesting original collage including the colourful aspects of it
• Create a new collage with stronger contrasts to make more defined screen prints
• Continue to collect different objects and watch things progress and change
• screenshots of Facebook newsfeed
• newspaper covers
• magazine covers
• During the project working on to my wall and layering the ideas and taking photographs each time its changes to show gradual development.

P.S This will probably be my longest blog entry as I had a lot to catch up on.