What I did today... (Eek I wrote a lot, feel free to just look at the pictures!)

Above a drawing that I made on paper about A0 size from the sketch that I have also been using to make the woodcut, below, which I think I have finished now. In my big drawing I tried to maintain some of the manner and looseness of the original sketch, I wanted to see how the scale would change it. I'm quite pleased with the result and I'd like to perhaps do some other large ink drawings based on sketches I make and things I observe and see where this takes me. I am enjoying the motive of suburban houses interspersed with palm trees, the palm trees make even mundane suburbia seem quite exotic to me, I find them very pleasing.
I had a really helpful chat with the drawing tutor today who is called Guillame. Unfortunately he is going to be working with the 5th years from now on but I'm glad I got the chance to talk to him. In our drawing class I discovered that the ultimate aim is to make a book! This was a little bit of a surprise to me but perhaps it will be a good challenge. I had already been thinking about doing some illustrations for a short story that Jon has written and I am thinking of doing some watercolours about A3 in size in order to do that, I hope they can be quite fluid and the colours bold-though with enough white space, I would then of course photograph/photocopy them and shrink them to book-size juxtaposing them with the text. (though I haven't started this yet) I had another idea which was to make a book just of drawings of the things I have observed which have caught my eye here- "les choses qui m'ont frappé". Sketches here are called "les croquis". So I could do drawings and then transfer them to screen prints to print a series of books maybe. Anyway I showed my sketches to Guillame and he seemed interested. He said he liked the sketch that the drawing above is made from partly because of the space around it, sort of drawing you in and somehow looking quite complete. (whereas with my other sketches I had worked right to the edge of the page which gives a different intensity and makes the space quite different I guess.) He said I should think about having areas of intensity and areas that were quieter by comparison. He also suggested I try working with them to a bigger size to see what would happen. I said that I hadn't really considered the light when I made the small sketches but he said perhaps this wasn't necessary as they are studies of space essentially, so perhaps this is what I should focus on. I felt really encouraged talking to him, I'm not sure exactly what he said but I felt talking to him that there was some potential in mes croquis, I should do more, and I should try to develop them, maybe keeping them quite gestural but also considering contrasts between having areas of high detail/intensity and areas with less detail/more space. I felt quite inspired to work, having arrived at school today towards the end of this lesson that to be honest I didn't know I had and feeling a feeling a bit tired a bit uncertain I suddenly felt v.inspired to work and I did indeed feel quite productive this afternoon. Hopefully it will continue! I have another sheet of paper set up in readiness! 

Group Collaboration-skipping back a bit in time... (week of the 14th March)

First week back after our two week break was workshop week! This turned out to be surprisingly intensive for the first week back, unlike in London where I always feel we ease ourselves and each other back into working mode gradually as the days go by, here it was 9 o'clock start Monday morning and didn't end until 6-6:30-this ended up being the routine for the next four days! However it was good to be feeling productive again. My workshop was based on a group project that I have been invited to get involved in by the tutor who organises it. It consists of the students creating an installation for a space, the installation can be physical and also should involve sound. We spent the first day making drawing and maquettes. The students are interested in the relationship between interior and exterior spaces and perceptions of said spaces. The main concept is monstre/montrer-the is a similarity in the wwords for monster and the word "show" in French. So the exhibition will be based around the idea of something being monstrous I suppose. The students were originally quite interested in the idea of creating a sort of labyrynthe. Here was my maquette I made, I was really thinking about the work of Thomas Hirschhorn that I saw in the Hayward Exhibition: "Walking in My Mind" which I saw a couple of years ago. I thought hte cardboard structure was very effective as a cavernous material, it would also be a cheap and readily available material to use and less of a fire risk than plastics.

I got talking to one of the students, who said this was a good idea and got quite excited about how to construct it, suggesting a wooden frame on which to base the cardboard. However it was starting to sound a bit complicated and I was somewhat relieved when we discussed it and things seemed to be turning towards a different idea which was the making of sculptures out of masking tape. I wasn't sure about this idea at first but the forms began to look quite organic particularly after the had become a bit disheveled after sitting in the studio for a few days. I made some drawings of them incorporating them into the space, we each drew different proposals of how we thought the space could be used. The space itself is a community center and very uninspiring so I think it'll be interesting to see if the artwork is strong enough to overcome that. I would quite like to make some prints based on the work that could be distributed during the show. I need to discuss this idea with the others, but the owner of the space was quite keen on the idea of distributing drawings, she wanted to show the process, however I got the feeling that the group would prefer to keep that separate, however drawings/prints just of the forms, could work. I may make some even if it turns out they won't be distributed. So I spent a lot of time drawing on Monday, Tuesday and Friday morning. The rest of the time I spent in the sound room with a friend who had invited me to help here with the sound piece. She had made recordings of the sea and we were editing it to make a sound piece that when installed could hopefully be sufficiently scary I suppose! I didn't do that much hands on stuff with this but I hope that by giving opinions etc I was of use and it was really interesting to see how you go about mixing sounds, there are layers and I found the program quite similar to that which you use to edit animations (something I tried in my elective last term). I have a better idea of how sound works now, sound is something I never even thought I'd find out about so to have actually learned a bit of the process of editing, cutting and over-layering sounds was really great, and I now know what some (well about 4) of the little knobby bits in recording studios are for! So all in all it was a good week, we are installing it a week today and I'm looking forward to seeing what it looks like. I didn't really work on it last week so I need to make sure I try to help bring everything together a bit this week. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turn out.

An example of a proposed masking tape sculpture, the sculptures are most dramatic when placed in front of the windows, the light highlights their structure.

Above, examples of other initial ideas.

Studies and life drawings made at the Toulouse Lautrec Museum In Albi