This final part of the course felt like a bit of a call back to tactile mark making from Topic 2–drawing and mark making to convey many different types of available information, this time not necessarily physical or touchable, but audible or showing what movements was capable of creating. It also reminded me of drawing with pattern (and colour) as in topic 4, by creating pieces that were made with repeating motions or by listening to repeating sounds and translating them, I created a different kinds of pattern and had to think about overlap and placement as well as size and scale.
I enjoyed seeing the merging of those two things in a more abstract way. I have tried to create abstract art in the past and often struggled, this part of the course has made me realise that it’s easiest, and more compelling, to create a good abstract piece when you have a reason for it. Whether that reason is playing with different tools in a particular way, restricting what you do to a particular degree, or reacting to some kind of stimuli and transferring that to the page. It’s definitely something I’m glad I have learned, in context to the larger art world, and it fits with some of the research I have done over the span of the course too, especially reminding me of the abstract art created by performance artists and sculptors that I looked at while researching three dimensional drawings.
I think I have further to go in practising switching between different mediums and tools, especially in combining more than one in a singular piece of artwork. I feel confident with ink and wet paint for example, but sometimes struggle to create dynamic things with pencil or charcoal. But I think I have shown that I’m not afraid to play and experiment. \with more reading around the subject of contemporary art, and it’s application to textiles, printmaking, or illustration, I hope I could find a path that I am happy to explore further.
At the start of this course I was apprehensive about larger drawing canvases, and I’ve definitely overcome that. In this ‘Movement and Sound’ section I was faced with large and sometimes oddly shaped pieces of paper and had to fill them with no subject to look at and copy, and no direction on what the art should look like, just the tools, methods, and sounds at my disposal and free reign to create something. And once the art was finished I was able to look at my work, and see which things had been translated to the page the way I wanted, and evaluate which things hadn’t worked out as well. I wouldn’t have been able to do that so well a year ago.
This section has definitely been the biggest encounter with experimental approaches to drawing, and learning which things I enjoy the most in that context; what I like the look of, what I am good at, and what processes I enjoy when creating. These feel like the three most important things to learn and what I will need to take forward into whatever I choose to do next.
It’s strange to have reached the culmination of the course but I think it has been a successful journey, and I definitely have a large body of work that I am mostly very pleased with to show for it!
Rebekah's OCA Learning Log 