Celebrate! Good times, C'mon!

Hey Hey!

So I'm in a much better mood this week after my FANTASTIC tutorial with Victoria Morton (http://www.themoderninstitute.com/artists/v_morton/index.php)

She has been an artist which has been in my research since first year and I am a great admirer of her work so it was brilliant to get a tutorial from her. She more than exceeded my expectations! She told me exactely what I needed to hear. My work recently has been very tentative and merely a clinical and emotionally detached distraction from my real feelings and my genuine creative process/product. I just hope I can explain this well enough on my Self - Evaluation form! My work this year started of being about a very traumatic thing which happened to my this summer and was, as a result, very subjective. Since first year, I had received the same criticism - your work is too emotional/subjective and doesn't address a wider issue. So you can see why I tried to be so clinical and detached this year, and to my disappointment and frustration, my work was still receiving quite a lot of criticism.

Victoria made me realise that I should embrace my creative practice and not allow my practice to be too heavily changed because of certain schools of thought. So what have I learned from all this?

1. That I have been top serious in terms of the content of my creative practice, especially seeing as I am my personality is much more humorous/sarcastic/dark/scattered. This is what I should be reflecting in my work.
2. That I try to change my work too much so that it gets good grades/feedback.
3. That when I try to change my work, I become uninspired and stop creating, or create much more dull things.
4. That I work best in sketchbooks, and that text is a big part of my work.
5. That I need to learn how to better justify my practice.

That's a hell of a lot to take away from one tutorial I think!

In other news, went to see John Doaks and Hazel Gores (4th Year P&P) work tonight on exhibition at The Vic. I really like John's work (just now focused in video installation) and have enjoyed watching him develop his ideas and skills, especially in installing the work. Hazel Gores work was fascinating as well.

Well it's a busy busy week for me ahead and I'm going to try and get a series of 7 small paintings done before Thursday night. I think I'm going to call the series: "Things you think about when bad stuff happens". It's going to be 7 portraits of all of my previous sexual partners with text explaining how I came to be involved with them. Some will be faceless, and others will be more complete. I hope my work will discuss my experience of self-reflection as well as be interesting as it will be like 7 little confessions (religion has played quite a large part in my life, making the confession part relevant). I hope they will be brutally honest, rather funny and make people question their own experience and how they judge their own behaviour.

Hope it all goes well! Over and out!