2017: Year in Review

2017 was very much a year of writing for me, well, of reading and writing. Having been accepted into studying illustration at Camberwell, I put aside working on my portfolio and decided to work more on further developing my ideas. I returned to the manuscript that I had aimed to complete in November and set about finishing it.

To be sure, not all went to plan...

A Year's Reading: 2017

I fell into reading a fair amount early this year and that put me on the track to wanting to continue and finish the year strong, with a good amount of reading under my belt. When I consider the handful of books I ordinarily pick my way through over the course of a year it is evident that I am not a prolific reader. In fact it would be difficult to say that I do much reading at all. Even so, the number of books that I want to read, that I tell myself I will read one day, only continues to grow in number.

What do you figure?

This is a coursework motivated post, with the aim of describing and analysing three different approaches to depicting figures/beings of my choosing (from a curated set).

The figure is an endlessly interesting subject for art, and as such has been subjected to seemingly endless treatments. As much as we may take an interest in the world around us, such is the condition of our self-obsession that we must seek to experience this world through the lenses and sensory inputs of other beings, even if those beings are merely figments of our imagination. The presence of the figure makes explicit what otherwise is only implicit: our relation to the external world.

For this post I'm interested in the depictions of figures by Antony Gormley, Christoph Niemann, and Robert Weaver.

A Few Thoughts on the Enlightenment

I took a visit to the British Museum and spent a good amount of time in the Enlightenment room. There one will find all manner of objects and books relating to the earliest period of the Museum's history, along with placards explaining and describing the thinking and knowledge of the time. There are weighty tomes sealed behind glass, some of which appear as though they might crumble if improperly handled, along with various scientific instruments, orrerys and collected artefacts from around the world. It very clearly creates the impression of a collection, as if some wealthy child grown tired of postage stamps had set out and gobbled up whatever he could find to catch his interest from the furthest reaches of the globe. What follows are a few jumbled thoughts of mine on this habit of collecting and the need to organise.

On Brutalism

Brutalist buildings are stark, dramatic, and austere. They are striking, stunning even. And how could they not be? Brutalist architecture exists not so much within its environment as it is opposed to it. It rejects the natural, replaces it with exacting artifice and confidently opposes all of the processes that made its own existence possible. The natural world is the natural enemy of brutalism, and by extension, so are humans.

Architecture

Architecture is the material actualization of a preferred system. It articulates how we feel the world ought to be. That it expresses a preference is a necessary consequence of its form: an architected form is a space transformed, a space replaced.

Orientation around Covent Garden and the West End

Another coursework motivated post. The task was to explore around the Covent Garden and West End areas of London, trying to visit as many key locations as possible, while producing written, photographic and drawn records. As well I was to find and collect things of interest from the environment. This exercise essentially familiarised me with a general research approach for exploring and documenting an area.

A lot of the places I was tasked with documenting were locations that would be relevant to illustration (art supply shops, galleries). Being plopped in the middle of Covent Garden I didn't exactly hit the ground running. When I first arrive in a place I find I'm not really ready to start seeking things out and constructing a mental model, rather first I aim to get a feel for things, to listen and let the place speak to me and then gradually build up a set of associations. This approach came crashing against my time constraint and instead I found myself rushing from spot to spot, hurriedly jotting down the most immediate of impressions like some twisted impersonation of a tourist. In any event, here follows what I managed to scrape together.