As my week of freedom came to an end, I made use of Friday to kill a few birds with one train trip to London. I wasn’t entirely sure about whether I would or not, even up to the very morning, but I submitted one painting for the Royal Institute of Oil Painters’ exhibition. As I’ll be traveling up for the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery on the day for collection of unaccepted work, it was worth giving it a try. I’d planned the day out to incorporate the submission, a trip to see Cha Jong-Rye’s work at Hada Contemporary, and the Postmodernism exhibition at the V&A; but after leaving the painting at Carlton House, I entirely forgot about detouring to see Jong-Rye’s work. It may have been for the best, as my feet were about to give up when I entered the Postmodernism exhibition, and by the time I’d finished, I felt like all of me was about to give up. I had a few minutes to brace myself for the Friday Late program of 15 minute talks, one of which I particularly wanted to hear as it held promise for my dissertation. Afterwards, I introduced myself to the curator and arranged to email her for more information – which I really must do straight away!
The exhibition itself was an eye-opener; putting so many of my own childhood observations and experiences of the 1980s into this specific context. I’ll also be going back to see the Power of Making exhibition – too packed due to the Friday Late crowd to view it properly, but definitely one for me.
Setting off for college on Monday morning I heard an ominous clunk come from my undercarriage. I stopped immediately and looked under the car, and knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere in a hurry. Or even in a few days. My problem wasn’t just going to be with missing college tutorials and the art history lecture, but in having to collect my prints from Margate after the close of Pushing Print. One difficult thing about living in a rural village is dependence on a vehicle. What I could do at home was start my paintings, so I wouldn’t waste too much time by being away from the studio. I started my first circular painting and competed the first layer with the tonal values.
I’d arranged weeks before for Phil to come to the college to give me a second sitting for the sculpture on Tuesday (the car was fortunately fixed in the morning) but I didn’t realise or remember that we’d be doing interim crits on that day. It was more than a bit awkward having to explain to the tutor that I was going to have to wriggle out of the crits after having mine, as well as to leave early to do the school run; I felt bad about it but I couldn’t turn down the chance to model the sculpture from life and take more pictures for other work, after my model had come all that way for me. The week in the studio had lasted less than 4 hours and felt rather bizarre. I did manage to get something out of my crit, the basic message from tutor and group being that the work needed sexing up a bit. Believe me, I can definitely live with that…
Wednesday brought a chance to do a bit of work on the sculpture after the morning’s additional dissertation skills session, before rushing up to Margate to pick up the prints and have another whiz ‘round Turner Contemporary, this time with a notepad to write a review for an artist-run magazine. Yes, I’ve got enough to do really, but I want to make use of my travels wherever I can. As I missed Monday I’ll have to hand in my brief for the first unit and a draft of the accompanying essay next week, so I’ll have some feedback on that soon enough. Until then I’ll stop myself finding even more things to do.
http://hadacontemporary.com/cha-jongrye/
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmoder…
