Today’s work, and the whole module I guess is focused around wiping your eyes clean of what you stereotypically think something looks like, what you have been conditioned from a small child into seeing - what you automatically draw if someone tells you to draw something. A house is a square with a rectangular roof, a bottle is curved rectangular shape with a long thing rectangular shape – that sort of thing. So the idea is to use our responsibility as arts and rediscover and refresh this perception. To find out what is new and known in the everyday and this is what is exciting.
The objects I began with today were a few things I picked up from a car boot sale at the weekend. I found an old bicycle wheel and a part of a radiator, you know the twisty bit that you turn the temperature up and down with? I don’t even know the name of it and it’s such a common thing in most households. I would never think of going to a car boot sale if I was short of a twisty thing for my radiator but anyway I’m sure because of its oddity I think it will make interesting work.
I began by drawing my object and looking at it, I was thinking to myself how can I make this object look really really special, something so boring and ordinary and just a bit random to buy at a car boot sale but make people look at my sketchbook and think wow that’s cool. What poped into my head was the Walt Disney film, Bed knobs and Broomsticks. The little boy in it, Paul looks after the gold Bed knob. After telling the bed where to fly to, he had to tap the knob three times and turn it a quarter turn to the left. The way in which he holds the bed knob and keeps it safe in his pocket and rubs it shiny shows how important this object is, just like my radiator thing.
I only made two prints today and neither or them made me feel like this, which is frustrating and deflating. The drawings looked flat and boring just as you would expect them to and the prints, the same. I tried to merge the drawings together through printing by etching them over each other but they still seemed dull and disinteresting.
I walked home thinking will I ever be able to make a radiator thing seem like its important in the same way that Paul can make the bed knob into something that every child wished they owned?
I think this is the sort of thing that comes with a mind set, do I really believe I am a good visual artist with the power to make the mundane fantastic and interesting as though it should be in a Disney movie? No I don’t and this is the problem I need to pick myself up put some blinkers over my eyes to concentrate and get on with it. This is what I took away from today, that it is up to me, that I am in control and that day to day, my work is what I make of it.
I think another problem, which is fixable, is not being sensitive enough to what I see. I can talk about it in an interesting way, I can talk about the little old man at the car boot sale who sold it to me how he demanded a pound for this broken piece of radiator! A whole pound. I can talk about the pieces of dust that if you hold It up to a window you can see through the little cracks, I can talk about the interesting pieces of this in a way that hopefully would make someone think oh cool I’d like to see these drawings, but then it isn’t translated through my drawings. Maybe im not trying hard enough, maybe I need some inspiration, maybe I need to work harder outside of class?
Next week will be better, I promise myself!
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