So, I’m quite drunk, but I thought it would be important to give a two minute update on how everything – including my art – is going.
My trip to Crete is just about at its halfway point, with Wednesday evening coming to a close. Today I was at a waterpark and came home exhausted, but with that exception I’ve painted every day!
We were a bit giddy in the sunset tonight but my brother caught this sweet silhouette before I stood for a long time in the sea.
My art has mostly been scenes but there’s been a little figure practice too. I look forward to being able to share them.
Primarily, the holiday has been beautiful but I miss my boyfriend Jamie. I know I’ll see him soon though!
So I’m heading up to Cardiff tomorrow as an intermediary point between here and Crete (joining my dad and his girlfriend Rachael before we all embark to the airport together the following day). I’m mentioning this because it means that I won’t get a chance to do art for over a week bar the small en-plain-air paintings I managed in France. I certainly won’t be able to get any more work done on the survival kit project.
This prompted a frantic stint on my sketchbook tonight, resulting in a page I’m really proud of.
Wow . Yikes .
The graphic design-esque nature of the two words was created pretty much on a whim, with a very vague yet different final product in mind. The feeling of confusion and sickliness comes through exactly as I’d hoped it to, though, and I count this as a massive success.
The lino cut prints were ones I created during my A Levels… but since my survival kit is themed heavily around anxiety about surviving independent life and how one is perceived to be surviving, I thought the eyes surrounding and blocking the faceless figure was only appropriate. I have a cut I’ve done in my leisure of a converse shoe I plan to use in later experiments.
One of my anxieties is whether I will make another actual lino cut I’m equally proud of soon. I’d like to try and make another complex piece like this one, perhaps similar with unsettling themes and eyes.
In other news, my blank white backpack arrived in the post! This is my container for the survival kit. I don’t have the time or resources to make a bag I’ll be happy with from scratch so I bought a blank white backpack to paint and embroider to my wee heart’s content!
I’ve been asked by my University, Oxford Brookes, to start a blog detailing my artistic journey. That includes what I create, the thought processes behind it and retrospectives on how it could be improved.
A recent embroidery – a nice, neutral, pleasing photograph to start a blog post with. In my opinion.
So I started a blog on Tumblr! It was a site I knew from a few years ago, and the tagging system made sense to me. It was about a month later I recieved an email that detailed that the blog specifically had to be on WordPress. In a similar way, they asked me to start a sketchbook, which I did – before (in the very same midsummer email) requiring it to be A4, which was considerably bigger than the size I’d chosen for myself.
So here we are, progress wiped and starting anew – new blog, new sketchbook, new me. In a note of optimism, I have been searching for a long time for a decent blogging platform and for some reason I dismissed WordPress, but after making the effort it looks like the perfect site!
And in regards to my sketchbook, I was a little distressed upon hearing that I couldn’t hand it in to fit the brief. And by distressed, I mean a month of serious work became irrelevant. After a very short and very mature cry, I tackled that problem by taking high quality photographs of all the relevant “survival kit” pages and scaling them up, before sticking them chronologically into my new A4 sketchbook.
See? Looks good!
The upside of that was that my small sketchbook had very quickly become a personal sketchbook – that is, doodles, irrelevant paintings and studies, etc. This is great (and what I am told constitutes a good sketchbook) – however, when I read the Survival Kit brief, it seemed like the sketchbook was supposed to be a lot more on-topic than I had made my own. So this is a chance to set that right, too!
I’ll see if this blog doesn’t take a similar turn. I guarantee it’ll become a diary. Because when I make art it’s inextricably linked to my life and what’s going on, so it only makes sense that I talk about the inspiration and cause of what I make. Want an example? I stitched lavender into the embroidery because I’ve spent all the summer season working at a tea shop on a lavender farm, and manning a gate to a beautiful lavender field. So there we go!
Let’s see if I can’t satisfy my need for order by figuring out how to categorise blog posts.
Gemma's Art 
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