Oh My god. This need to written about

ARNULF RAINER AND DAMIEN HIRST together in one room...
Why can't I live in Austria or you know close enough so I could go!
Think this would be a dream.... if I could.
But the delights of being a student dont entitle me to this pleasure so I'll just stare at the pictures this morning, to October. Might just have to scrape together some money so I can go see this even if it is ALONE I really don't care. Going to the Arnulf Rainer Museum anyway would be just a delight. Been a follower since college when I stumbled across the beauty of his work. Constant inspiration to me.
ALSO A(Drawing)A(CoreFineArt)B(CCS) for 1st Year bitches...
Also got a summer project so will hopefully get that posted because its more the style and issues we want to solve than the school well until we have to go back and they tell us about the final painting in September maybe I can get my yfutHkuHtctxKFztkdtrILH6drzxDGIDC on and just paint more for me this summer

Say what?!

So officially finished first year of university at the heaven that is Grays School Of Art.
Its kind of been scary, just this time last year I got the news that I was accepted and I had an end of year exhibition coming up at college to worry about, but this year sooo calm. WHAT!?
I'm currently in the process of  making an actual website I have no idea why..... I GOT BORED okay.
I have to say I've missed college only because in the final year we got to decide our specialism and create our own brief and here I've been taken back a step, but I don't fear that it done me any harm. In many ways it's challenged me and my perception of my work. I've doubted myself, I've gone through endless days, I've hated making work, I've loved making work. Moments of tears and joy and relief have I think everyones has experienced in our first year. I dont know where the saying "Art is easy"... bloody far from it. But I've came to realise that first year isnt a walk in the park as everyone says its here to test the students willpower and dedication and their sense of adventure in making art. Its been a great first year I have to say being around this many arty people, seriously is artinfectious. The space in the studios is great yeah I got to make a mess Borders College. But yeah I don't think I was aloud to make as much of a mess as I did. Painting on the actual wall to see how big my final for Autobiographical would be, apparently might piss some people off for when they redecorate the whole of Grays for the Degree show. Woooops , sorry, not sorry. But I'm missing this years End of year show back in the Borders, really quite gutted as I always had in mind that I would go, but I'm still in Aber'dream' - thats Aberdeens amazing nickname. Well thats what I get for being a poor art student. Fitting in the art student stereotype a wee bit there!

MY GRAYS JOURNEY

Starting off making a gigantic pair of scissors. Getting sick to death of drawing chairs for weeks on end. FIRST CRIT. New drawing methods. Wandering around aberdeen. Sense of Place. Creating a book of Aberdeen. Doubt. no CRIT - too scared. Body Project. Back to my comfort zone. Okay maybe not my comfort zone. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. NO PAINTING only DRAWING. Twisting meanings. Digging. Tutorial. CRIT. Christmas Holiday working. Hand in. Little London Holiday. 1st painting outside university work. Results. GOT A 'B'. Pictorial Space. B&Q days. Studies, studies and more studies. Colour. Tone. Composition. Days and Nights. 13 weird ass hours on a bus. 4 angry and pissed off hours in London. Paris finally. Culture. Experience. Art. My love affair with FRANCE. 13 sleepy hours on a bus. Critical and Contextual Studies lectures (NOT ART HISTORY). Forum and Seminar debates. Autobiographical project. Research. Studies. Lost. Making own canvas frame and stretching canvas. Collaging. Something new for me. Lunch hour-s chatting. Coffee. Worrying. Wrong outcome. Learning from mistakes. Finishing up. correcting. Waiting. Hand In....... now for my final results... FRIDAY.

OH and here is my final for the Autobiographical project.

Pictorial B&Q

So here it was the first of many projects where we actually paint in a Painting course.
Our brief was quite simple in the fact of the first week we had to go to the B&Q down the road - at the Bridge of Dee - and use this subject matter to visualise pictorial space, thats all we had to do create pictorial space. It was harder than expected but only because of the size of the B&Q to much to choose from, my mind was all over the place before we started this one, but I realised that if I take B&Q a section at a time then I can get there.

Through my explorations I found that I liked the spaces which confused the audience where you had more than one area of space exposed in the image. This lead me to a wardrobe. A lovely wardrobe - which I really, really would love in the flat cause ours is rubbish - and the area around  it where it was the boxes for wardrobes, as they created a very flat constricted depth, a airy and large depth and a dark constricted enclosed depth all in one image. I went on a venture where I took a mirror and went round parts of B&Q with this mirror to reflect the large space in juxtaposition with the enclosed space with the mirror sitting in it. I though this would reflect the vast open area of the store but also show the space which is condensed with so much products sort of shaping the B&Q. Playing around with composition i thought i would definitely go towards this one piece but after developing so much my brain hurt I went onto another just to see and this turned out to be the one I went for in my final. the ones below are just the experiments

In the style of Nina Murdoch

In the style of Suzanne Song. 

I had a lot of ideas where the brief wouldn't allow me to go, but i liked the idea of simplifying the area to make it more abstracted and less photo realistic -which i think quite a few people in my class went for. 

I went  for the cupboard instead of the boxes as I liked the composition and the effect of it as it was unusual subject. I liked that you got 3 degrees of depth in one image, where your stopped straight at the paper  it goes back into dark and you have this reflected space of the vast space of B&Q, thought this showed a lot of pictorial space and compositionally it went well on the page. 

Getting there with my final image, I decided to go for a close up on a wardrobe so you got an abstracted version of the space. I didn't have that much freedom with it but I did try to go to the boundaries in all aspects, I was told to put people in there and make it the whole thing make  it  more detailed.... Nope I'm not doing that!

FINAL IMAGE :)

So after 4 fairly short weeks I had arrived at the end result with time to spare :). I'm really pleased with the outcome as its something I wouldnt of considered before - as I didn't find it interesting maybe its because I was painting finally so I could do what I've wanting to be doing since we started in September. I think I made  it my own and tried to Annie-ify the image as much as I could within the briefs boundaries. Yeah there were times of confusion but god when is there not! It was nice to spend this much time on one image as before I would be rushing to get it done, i enjoyed the relaxed approach even though we only had 4 weeks to produce this, i felt like the progression made sense, it was lovely to have all my focus on one image and stand back take breaks feeling like an actual art practitioner procrastinating as much in between so I went to it with fresh eyes, which i think is very important.

On to the next one I say!

What do you think? Does it portray pictorial space? What is pictorial space? Do you love B&Q as much as me now?

(Btw I do already have a love of the place so now I love it even more so you won't cause B&Q is now my baaaaby)

Thanks for reading and viewing my massive essay things

Annie :) x

Habitat

So I am here again :) Results from last semester are in (Got AABBB overall B), thrown back into the deep 'Gray' of aberdeen and just finished the first Project of this semester WOOO!

This semester started of with a steady drawing week. Well I say 'drawing week' it was more of a what the hell week! As we arrived on monday morning David came in with cardboard and willow, what the? We as a class were going to build a cube with this cardboard the size of the class room, lets just say the child inside us all, was screaming.So that was our day. and tadaaaa......

That just took us 2 hours to complete TEAM WORK! call the coffee break. Anyways then came the task of drawing this on an A0 sheet of paper, using all the techniques to get this in the right proportion or the whole image by the end of the week could be ruined and completely out of proportion. 

DAY 1 Done! 

Day 2 began with David coming in telling us that we were going to construct a graveyard out of cardboard and willow and paper and anything we could find around our wee painters studio and so the construction began and in 2 hours we had this! 

Again for the rest of that day we had to put in everything we found appropriate to our image! I made a few of them gravestones  :) and thats my wonderful moustache gate thing hanging that I brought in, we had our graveyard! and I had  my drawing! 

 Now we knew from day one this project was all about not being afraid of changing environments in one image and merging drawing making the initial image change all the time, not being so precious with our drawings and embracing change of an environment, but i don't think any of us in our class expected our hard work to look like this on thursday when we turned up 

This was really our final day to complete our drawing adding in the dramatic changes into our past image again not getting that precious with our work. Here is my end result then :) 

We had a model come in and scare a few of my classmates as he was just lying there next to a real skeleton under gravestones in the underground segment of our graveyard habitat. I wanted to embrace the creepy-ness of the graveyard and make it quite mysterious and confusing for the viewer which is why theres a lot of floating gravestones and a powerful tree inside this magical box. This week was all about as well picking an interesting composition and picking and choosing. I went round the whole structure a couple of times to get information from the other sides to bring to my 'foreground' of the cube. Really enjoyable week and really pleased with the image i sneakily painted mine..... don't tell... well i painted the background i guess the rest is drawing in 'wet' media! And on friday we jumped on this thing tore it down and said bye to the painters graveyard in GB04. Semester 2 had officially started.

Thanks for reading

Annie x

PLACE PROJECT Final peice.

......CONTINUED

Plenty of experimentation onto how I would layer the different images lead to tracing paper, acetate, card but found my final order.

1. I would rub the prominent surface of that area onto a piece of A4 paper

2. Then create a grid of 4 down 5 across and paint each the individual colours relating to that area.

3. On a piece of acetate i would in white ink draw the movement of the people using the edges of the paper as the edges of the area.

4. I would add on top of the white in a black linear circle which got bigger the longer people waited in a certain spot

5. On the opposite side of the acetate i would visualize recordings from the center of each area. 

6. Draw on the grid lines and the grid key 

7. Stick together and voila you have a page of my map.

I figured out that because I couldn't do this on a grander scale as acetate in the uni didn't go to A1 size i would create a book 'road atlas' of Aberdeen and this would be my connection to my map characteristics a road atlas of non places. Each non place would be ordered in the order that i would meet them on my way to gray's from my flat.

Hope you enjoyed folks.. that's the end of Semester One! Time flies too fast.

Onto the next one on the 3rd Feb so wont be uploading for a while anyway, but thanks

Annie :) x

PLACE PROJECT Research and Idea Generation

So part of our development and idea generation we had to merge what we had done in the 1st week to final make a map of Aberdeen which showed a sense of Place. We got told its not a map but has to have map characteristics and its got to equal the size of an A1 piece of paper. This was gonna be a tough one, mostly because, I have no idea where to start an A0 piece of paper staring back at me for a week.. yeah that really happened I cant really do big pieces of paper even if it is better for crits and assessment, just too big for my brain to handle. So I started by going around and scanning the fricken heaven of a scanner/printer... saves my life all the time. I figured out I preferred the places to which people don't pay to much attention to and sort of ignore these was where my interest grew looking down alleys and see where people didn't go instead of where they do go in places. One of my favourite tasks (and I know this will sound creepy) was the mapping of people in an area creating line drawings which build up to show movement of a certain area. Also the sound recording was just hilarious (bus sounds coming from your bag causes an awful lot of looks)

Finding places or in my case what i called Non-Places where what they where because of certain elements sound, texture, people, colour so I took several things from our first week and decided to try and get this sense of place I would layer them on top of each other. It was just how and how the hell would I get it onto an A1 scale, que the mind blank!

The communication design people got a tip to try out the Adobe Kuler website to create colour palettes from images if they couldn't do this on site in the first week. This with my favourite Google Picassa and its collage feature I created the above grids of colour.

Seeing these where in the shape of the grids on a map, it gave me the idea that this could be my background to my layered map.

To be continued........

Annie :) x