Back to School Update: Drawing 221 - Ideas and Concepts

This drawing course that I finished last Fall focused on the idea-based nature of studio practice. There were four major assignments around concepts or approaches prevalent in contemporary art practice. The assignments illustrate my point in an earlier post about the drawing classes' emphasis on concepts and ideas and less on technique. None-the-less it was a very valuable exercise on a number of levels. There was a lot of emphasis on looking at contemporary artists' work for inspiration as well as on the planning and documentation processes associated with creating an art work and creating an artist's statement which I found particularly helpful.

A Night at the Cosy Pub: Spike, Carmen Miranda, and Smurfly Seuss Druid

The first assignment focused on repetition and revision. The idea behind my project was a contemporary play on the concept of a tea cosy and the social gatherings that occur around a pot of tea.

Fundamentally I am very interested in why we attribute an inner life to inanimate objects and what characteristics of objects contribute to this. I also became interested in how repetition and placement impacted the narrative. These questions are under discussion in this cosy pub scene .. or is it just a fun night out?

How to Achieve Balance

The second project project had us creating a piece based on a binary notion of our choosing. It often feels that it is inherently part of human nature to operate in either of two extreme modes: complacency or panic and I thought this would be an interesting concept to explore. This was one of those pieces that felt good in concept and everything was mapped out and well planned and then  ... it turned into something completely different than I expected - in this case not a happy accident. Everything was going well in pencil but it needed some intensity so I tried wet brushing on powdered graphite and it just went downhill from there - made a nice fire starter though.

The third assignment involved creating a thematic or metaphorical piece. Part of the assignment was to examine the relationship between concept and media. I started thinking about wool and associated meanings - loss and the Bo-peep nursery rhyme came to mind. I've been wanting to experiment with felting wool onto chicken wire for a while and this seemed like an ideal opportunity. Despite some extensive researching I could not find any one who has tried this so was on my own with lots of experimentation to figure out how to make it work. The piece was bottom lit with a flickering internal chest light which is not evident here. Felting on chicken wire is not for the faint of heart but I think it created an appropriate metaphor for the concept of loss and all its associated emotions.The rigidity of the wire and shrinking of the felt created this feeling of ephemeral tension and conflict in an ethereal object.

The final project required the creation of body prosthetics and incorporating them into a performance piece (yup - this is a drawing class). So I decided to do a humorous piece on inner speech and how we have developed a set of terms and concepts to characterize decision-making approaches. This is me listening to my gut.












Additional cast members include Conscience, Temptation,  my heart, my gut, and of course I had to make a comment on too much navel gazing.


Probably one of the most helpful things associated with this class, besides the procedural things I mentioned before, was the requirement to map out the influence of the contemporary art world, the real world and our own personal experience for each of our projects. I think I came away from this class with a much better ability to research, plan and document my work as well as to look at it within a broader context.