Tomorrow is the 1st of May and I’m counting down to submitting my final module for my Fine Art BA (Hons) degree. Submission day is 3rd of June for this module and beyond that point I can do no more towards passing this degree. This has been a long journey, for what my fellow students don’t know is that I first enrolled at this very college over 30 years ago. I didn’t stay very long, I was on a design course rather than fine art and I really wanted to be doing Fine Art. So I left. That was 1981 and I was just 2 weeks past my 16th birthday. When I enrolled for this degree it was 2012 and I was 47. In the 31 years in-between I had lead many lives in many places. Now I am home and this degree is all mine. When I receive it no one can take it away from me, and I will have given my best to achieve it.
It seems only fitting that my final module is an enquiry into journeys and passage of time.
As my deadline draws closer there is plenty to think about as well as considering What Art Really is? Taking a degree in the subject is a process of questioning my own practice and that of others. It is this discourse that forms our dissertations, what we discuss in the cafeteria over the chocolate bar we said we wouldn’t have that day, its the question in lectures and presentations by visiting guests and artists that circles like a vulture over the remains of our initial idea about what art really is. Is it art, does it communicate? Tolstoy held that an artist’s ultimate job is to express and communicate emotions to an audience. There is also the argument that art should stand alone, “A work of art is a thing in the world” as Susan Sontag stated in her 1966 essay “not just a text or commentary on the world”. From my own perspective I am only concerned with getting my ideas onto my canvas in a way which satisfies me. If I try to do art for other people it won’t work and it is when I remember that that I am most free in my practice. My practice is painting, I love paint, I love the way it moves across the canvas and yes, I’m talking canvas, that very traditional approach to beginning a painting which sometimes, at art college in particular isn’t used as much as a substrate for making a painting. Is canvas necessary or even relevant any longer? Of course it is, it stands on the shoulders of great artists such as Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky and today it is just as relevant. I love being able to make marks, gestures, layer washes of paint which ultimately leads to my standing back and feeling that it works for me and that’s the only opinion which really matters.
So as I move forward in the coming weeks I’m going to be blogging to see how my attitude is affected by stress and the pressure of concluding this degree and how much importance I place upon the view of others. After all my work is going to be judged; Have I done enough? Is what I have done relevant? All those questions we ask ourselves throughout our degree because we have to analyse why we do this thing called art at all. Its an engagement which show you have integrity with your work, that it does possess value for yourself, if not for others.
I may post some artwork, I’m not asking people to like it, this is not a Facebook page, this is a record of the coming days and weeks until that moment when I can throw my cap in the air and declare “I did it, this is my moment and I feel great, not just because I will have passed my degree but because I concluded this journey and ultimately found something out about my practice that I didn’t know when I started – else why would I have done it?
