Assignment 3: Feedback reflection

4 October 2016. After having received an incredibly quick, accurate and warm feedback from my tutor I feel very much strengthened and encouraged to continue on my road by keeping the general direction, but using the brakes more often to give myself the time to do much more well-thought-out and documented experimentation at sketchbook level and beyond. This is exactly what I know already and wrote down at several points in my blog, but the putting into reality has been made very difficult by the ever-increasing pressure we experience in everyday life with our son. But another very important point: My tutor told me not to worry about leaving things unfinished. This is something I did not realise before – I had thought that an exercise needed a presentable outcome, but it appears that this is not the case. This will of course make experimenting a lot freer. I feel that Part 4 of the course “Looking Out” will provide me with ample opportunity to enter a new task by setting the scene with lots of different quick painted sketches. My tutor suggested using either good quality acrylic paint or watercolours for this and I will try and adapt my inkpen thumbnails to painting. I know that I will need to loosen up and discard any finished paintings in my head to allow these processes to occur at all. We’ll see whether I will be able to let go in this way.

Now to the individual remarks and suggestions:

1. It is true that sometimes I have a problem placing correctly and scaling down a subject to the size paper I choose. This occurs more rarely now, but may happen if I do the primary sketch of a larger-scale work very quickly, even if my sketchbook setup worked well. I will pay particular attention to this problem in the part of the course to follow.
2. The sketchbook paintings following my research on thermographic imaging felt quite liberating for me and I will use the technique again in the next part of the course, especially where the task is the creation of a certain mood.
3. I love combining drawing/painting and text and will follow my tutor’s suggestion to try and produce some work in that manner.
4. I will expand on my iridescence experiments, both coloured and monochrome, to incorporate at a later point in the course, in Part 5 at the latest (for which I have already chosen a subject, where iridescence could play an important role).
5. My tutor emphasized that I must separate with care my approaches as a caricaturist and as a painter. I will keep as a reminder my own failed attempt at combining the two!
6. Preparatory work should occur in series and quick succession to avoid a picture in my head to dictate the outcome. My tutor suggests to first of all write a description of an  experience, then to decide whether it would be figurative and only then to make a large number of very simple sketches without a finished piece in mind at all. This is to open up a more abstract approach to working that “suggests rather than explains the image to the viewer”. I think that I know exactly what I would need to do and I can only hope that my mind and hand are ready to take this next step.
7. My sketchbook will from now on be a purely painted, fluid, rapid one, I promise.
8. Regarding the learning log I will try and incorporate research on the intentions different artists have.
9. I am very much aware that my writing style does become quite personal at times, but under the given circumstances there is no way around it. This is why I take the risk to continue doing so while keeping in mind the requirements of an academic writing style. Sometimes I also feel that it may be necessary to incorporate an emotional aspect into the text accompanying the development of a work, because only then it may become possible to interpret my intentions. I will, however, be rigorous when writing up my account for formal assessment.
10. In the next part I will continue exploring the properties of transparent layering and its influence on the transportation of the properties of light.

The artist research suggested in the feedback will be reported on in separate posts.

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