SB3 Research: Robert Capa: In Love & War

"Love" and "war" - these are two words that I'm very interested in, and two words that seemed to follow Capa through this life. This was an absolutely fascinating watch, and gave me a much more rounded understanding of who Endre Friedmann (who later became 'Robert Capa') was. 

I'm now sure that the direction I want to push my work in is tracing this balance between man and myth, the balance between the political, passionately Democratic, Hungarian-born Jew, who felt an instinctive urge to document the faces, triumphs, dangers and travesties of war, and the hard-drinking, hard-gambling, hard-partying bohemian, eternally homeless and surrounded by gaggles of friends, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Pablo Picasso, and lovers, including Ingrid Bergman.

I now know what I want to convey in my work - the problem now is finding a way to do so. 

Paint scares me

I've been wanting to get back into painting for a while now - it's been so long since I've done it. If I fall out of practice of something I always get a bit scared to go back to it, fearful that I'll have lost all understanding of it. 

Picking up my gouache again was better than I thought it would be. I'm going to try to do a little bit of painting every evening for the next week or so, just to ease myself back into it. 

Here are some dopey looking broccoli-trees.

'Hockney'

I caught this feature-length documentary on BBCiPlayer last week, and it completely BLEW. MY. MIND. 

I'm a great admirer of Hockey's work (the sheer volume of his output, alone, is jaw dropping), but this film really engaged with the character behind that magnificent body of work. After watching it, and reflecting upon some of Hockney's greatest pieces, the idea that the only true formula for producing great art is experience+practice+perseverance, really began to resonate with me. You cannot start anything and immediately expect to become great, but with a willingness to work constantly, and to allow your practice to be shaped by the world around you, and everything you experience and see, something amazing could just happen. Work the way you want to work, do the things you want to do, don't let your vision become blurred by endless suggestions of what you should or could be doing - David Hockney is the very essence of this mindset. 

a drawing in praise of Hockney

Lists of 10 pt III: 10 rules

• I will paint more
• I will be braver in my work
• I will aim to do one thing that I feel enriches me, in some way, everyday.
• I will be optimistic, but not oblivious + I will not be pessimistic, but I will still acknowledge, accept and work on my own flaws
• I will use my diary, and I will timetable the hours in my week
• I will make some sort of plan - what do I want from this, where do I want to go with this, and how am I going to get there?
• I will never stop engaging with the world around me, and learning more about it every day (this is my greatest strength, and I will treasure and nurture it)
• I will live simply
• I will draw everyday, for the love of drawing 
• I will work through slumps and difficult times in a calmer, more level systematic way + I will not let unavoidable events in my life drastically effect my momentum and output.

Lists of 10

10 things I want to be better at:

• Structuring my time around deadline weeks
• Computer based skills
• Accepting that sometimes the simplest option is the right one
• Self-promotion and networking
• I want to develop a more confident understanding of colour
• Wild and uninhibited media exploration
• Making a statement
• Keeping sketchbooks
• Finding time to make art, purely for the love of making art
• Analysis work with a professional eye, rather than an emotional one.

10 Places I want to go to/people I want to meet:

• St. Petersburg 
• Finland
• India
• David Hockey
• Carson Ellis
• Tony Benn (deceased)
• Angela Carter (deceased)
• Adrian Mole (fictional)
• Portland, Oregon 
• The Great Unknown 

10 things I want to change:

• How effectively I keep on top of long modules, e.g. Visual L.
• How experimental I am in my processes
• How much I contribute to the group
• How harsh I am on myself 
• + on top of that, learn that mistakes are often inevitable, and that they are to be accepted and learned from
• How efficiently I run my blog (also, how snazzy my blog looks)
• Knowing the line where ambitious becomes irrational
• How heavily I rely on pencils
• The range of subjects I make work about
• How much time I spend in the studio

10 things I want to know more about:

• What routes I could follow, other than 'an illustrator'
• Self-publishing
• Various printmaking processes
• Types of 3-d work, specifically ceramics
• Book making
• Master's degrees
• How to paint with a tone of voice
• Adobe illustrator
• Lettering and typography
• Life, the universe, and everything.

Interning with Owen Gildersleeve pt. I

I'm a paper-cut nut at heart, even though it's not something I feel I do enough of at the moment. Last year I was very fortunate to get to do a few days of work experience at Rob Ryan's Ryantown studios (Rob Ryan may be commercial as shit, but he's a consummate professional who knows what 'the market' wants.) I only discovered Owen Gildersleeve's awesome paper craft fairly recently, but decided quickly that he was an exciting practitioner, and that I wanted a piece of the action. I sent him an e-mail asking him if there'd be any chance of him wanting a workie/studio assistant/slave-for-a-day over our Easter break and sent him a view examples of my own paper cutting - and he invited to spend a whole week at his studio!

I'm very excited about this opportunity, and actually quite proud of myself - I'm a pretty shy person by nature, and it's taken me a long time (it's still an ongoing process) to settle in here. I feel that I've shown guts and initiative in getting myself this placement.

Shape Inspiration

Still struggling a bit to think in shape. Worried that I'm getting to bogged down in the fear of vectors, so I'm seeking some different shape inspiration. 

I'd never heard of Laura Owens before her book grabbed my attention in the library, but I absolutely love her work. She's a fine artist, not an illustrator, but uses loads of flat shapes within her work, combined with pattern and painterly detail to create beautiful worlds. 

I've also been revisiting Henri Matisse's cut-outs. The exhibition at the Tate was one of the best things I've ever seen.

Matisse's flat, coloured are so potent, and so full of vibrancy and motion. 

Spending an afternoon getting re-acquainted with other shape work was the boost I needed: A reminder that SHAPE  doesn't have to mean SOULLESS 

Lizzy Stewart's Solo

When I'm sad or having a rough time, I look at work that either makes me smile, or helps me think through my problems. At the moment, it's Lizzy Stewart's Solo project, which is "a sort of diary about doing things in London", that's helping me iron out my brain creases. Solo is exactly that, an illustrated diary of a 20-something year old introverted illustrator, just trying to make her way in the world. It's at once poignant, funny, heart-warming, brutally honest, and sometimes very, very sad. There's nothing groundbreaking in there, it's just day-to-day happenings of life,but for some reason I find it so comforting to look through. It's an interesting way of getting your head around what it means to be alive and to be searching for answers for questions that you're not even sure of. 

Solo brought so much comfort to me, for whatever reasons, during a very rocky patch. Something that really helped clear my head was keeping a solo style diary of my own for a while. It helped me see and think more clearly, a way to be honest with myself about how I was feeling. It was a very cathartic process.

my own mini solo-s

TASK: Visual map

This task was to produce a visual map or diagram showing where we're at right now and what we've learned. I went for a 'map' in more of a traditional sense. Aesthetically, this isn't a very strong piece of work, but I think i got some important bits of information about what I've learned and how I'm handling this year in it. 

Task: Superheroes

This task was actually a really fun follow up to the poster's we'd made. Naomi and I teamed up to create superheroes of each other. I liked the fact that Naomi ran with the nautical theme of my poster. I need to find a hat like that.

Although I was pleased with my ideas for my Naomi's picture, such as

including her wine jet-pack as a throwback reference to her book brief, and the LIBERTA on her costume as a nod to both her Italian heritage and her politics, in hindsight i I wish I'd used felt pens or ink in order to make bolder, more zing-y colours, which I think would be more appropriate for Nome.

I don't often do this kind of character design, so this was a fun, refreshing session that mixed things up a bit.