Gone Postal

I am a big fan of ‘the list’ and happy to report that I am on track as of this rainy, cold Monday morning.

I can’t help it. I’m a teacher. I have been for a very long time. It’s not surprising then that a focus on learning should be central to my MFA practice-based research.

I am forcing myself to learn new things. Restricting my palette. Already I am wishing I had stayed with the known. But what would be the fun in that?

Soon, peer tutors will teach me what they know about their favourite printmaking techniques.

And in anticipation, today I am playing with my son’s images. Working with photographs taken during a recent ‘cull’ of three file boxes of work by the forever-drawing youth.

It is making me miss him terribly.

In a previous entry (#6) I wrote about Becka Viau’s scribbles – well-practiced lines at the heart of works she was creating as part of a This Town is Small/City Nights performance in July, 2011.

Recently, I attended a lecture at Cardiff School of Art and Design by Professor Andre Stitt. Stitt shared several photographs of remarkable arches created while hurling buckets of paint and clay and this has been resonating – thoughts about a body’s memory for movements that result in mark making.

I thought that the notes on the studio wall at Inkspot were about the difference between skill and other types of learning and I suppose they are. But Stitt and Viau have me thinking more globally about my own body movements and mark making.

I won’t be painting with hoops, but am intrigued and have some compelling ideas associated with a more open interpretation of well-practiced lines. More to say another time.

http://www.beckaviau.com/

https://www.facebook.com/events/133412333416608/

http://www.andrestitt.com/

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle…

G O N E P O S T A L – Outgoing JAN. 25 2012

Nothing quite beats exchanges by mail.

Yesterday I visited Sam Park’s in-house studio in Bristol to get some advice on video editing software for my aging Mac and some antiquated sound equipment I brought from the colony.

I took a few shots in the kitchen while I was there but it wasn’t until I up-loaded them this morning that I realized I had been in Sam’s kitchen before. Well, not exactly physically there.

Just how I came to be scrutinizing photos of Sam’s kitchen more than a year before meeting Sam is not of any real concern here, but this morning’s discovery reminded me why the nature of on line images fascinates me and why their exchange is central to the current project documented in this blog.

I first used on line images extensively in ’36 weeks on facebook’ (2006). 36 weeks was an exercise in transparency and monitoring wellness. Weekly I uploaded photographs and text – journal-type entries – documenting virtually everything I did.

The project was based on a photograph I had taken of Ken Gregory’s work at Confederation Centre of the Arts. I wrote about of the experience of looking at this photo that I ‘not only remembered exactly how I felt at the time, I could taste who I was on the roof of my mouth’ – palpable, body-centred memory captured in a photo.

And seemingly preserved.

Unlike the dalmatian photo below – once seen, the dalmatian cannot be un-seen – neither new knowledge nor time seemed to change the image’s capacity – very useful when doctors ask how long you have been feeling a certain way.

But today I am wondering about my perceptions. The experience of sitting in the real kitchen means that now, as I look at the other dart photos, I am there. I know the orientation of the table, where in the kitchen to replenish my tea, where the table is in relation to a lovely little picnic nook outside and where the house and its yard are located in relation to significant landmarks – now known places – in Bristol itself. The difference seems to have something to do with mapping and positioning.

I think I am a good student because of how much I love the promises inherent in the possibility of being wrong. And I thinking it would be a really nice thing if the Eastern School District decided they would extend my sabbatical for an additional five years. Or so.

http://samparkmusic.com/Site/home.html

http://www.robertpepperell.com/papers/papers1.html

http://www.cheapmeat.net/kengregoryTop.html