Critique Notes

Note: For anyone reading who hasn't experienced it before, a critique is often when an artist or maker will present their practice or their work to other creatives and receive feedback and answer questions about it. This post is me thinking out loud, typing all of my thoughts out after having the crit. My ramblings may seem random or confusing, but in publishing this I hope that I can train myself into saying something useful. It also forces me to think more critically about my practice and try to keep the constructive feedback coming in my own psyche. I hope that you enjoy reading.

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Today in the crit I noticed a lot of talk about materials, the relationship between walking and drawing, about being present in a landscape, the validity of the studio in my practice and where my work actually happens.

My work happens in the field. It happens as I travel via walking, car, boat, train and it happens when I stop somewhere. The view from a window, from sheltering behind a wall from the wind, looking down, across, up, through, between. It happens the majority of the time through witnessing, drawing en plein air and through photography, capturing that moment or that happening in a moment down on paper, film or imprinting on my memory. 

It is then taken back to my studio to be reflected upon, to be reimagined, repositioned, reestablished, reconsidered. I use the studio as my sort of safe space for play and experimentation with my materials, as well as a factory for churning out and storing my art. 

Steven mentioned how there is something work-a-day about the way that I had presented my work. I had positioned on the table my large scroll drawing of the tree on the estuary, my metalworking experiments from this morning, my monoprint of the channel marker and some of my Venice drawings, as well as a copper etching plate with my soap ground design and my chicken on japanese paper. None of them were resolved or finished works, but I was trying to use them as a map of what is going on in my head. 

When Steve said work-a-day, he was referring to the plastic slips that I had left my work in on the table. I had done this purely out of needing to keep them clean and dry, but actually a lot was pulled out of that symbolically. We noticed the way that the drawings had been ripped out of the sketchbook, how the marks were “violent...almost burning”. It made me think about just how raw, intuitive, embodied the drawing was. It made me think about the immediacy or instinct that I feel when I need to stop and draw or I need to stop and take a photo NOW. It gives a real feeling of just how my attitude comes through - I am not here to make shining, polished works that are already hung and ready to be sold. I am busy making. I am busy walking. I am drawing now because this is what I am doing right now and then I am going to put that to one side for later and carry on with something else, carry on with the walk. My practice is the doing, not the thing that is a product of the doing. 

The word “messy” was pointed out to me. I  used it to describe the messiness of the subject matter and why I lean towards certain materials such as charcoal or ink or graphite rather than watercolour to depict my imagery. It is an interesting point to make and I think that word was used in a hurry. Reconsidering it, I think I lean towards those materials because they work best, or at least I enjoy using them most or perhaps find them to most easy to use for my current work. I think they give me a certain freedom of mark-making and charcoal in particular is a very forgiving medium whilst also being so striking. I can get a certain curve or mark so precise and it looks great in charcoal because of the soft, fleshy nature of it in comparison to the flatness of ink, but if it goes wrong or needs something more I can smudge it all away. 

One interesting comment that I had was “what are we doing when we take on a label or a word such as landscape” and I think that is a very important thing for me to consider currently. I suppose I chose to say landscape because that is the place that I have been operating in recently. I don’t exactly create obvious figurative or representational work, but it is heavily inspired by the landscape. But my practice is more than just presenting an image about or of a landscape - it is the sense of place that I find interesting. It is the monuments, the icons, the things that catch the eye. Perhaps I ought to say landmarkers instead… after all, my main motif for the last year or so has been the Venetian channel markers. Sea-markers, in that case. Place-markers. Markers in general. Mark-making. Marks. Marks is enough.