The Backstory
Tuesday the 4th of October was a really exciting day for me because it was the first day of my MA studying Fine Art Digital. I met a number of fellow students online and we had some interesting conversations. Part of the course requires us to keep a blog – a journal of our creative journeys. I’ve had experience of creating blogs in WordPress and I’ve even run a basic WordPress workshop. However I am by no means an expert, so for this reason I was quite torn about my approach to this.
I had two options – either I could start my MA blog from scratch, or I could repurpose an existing blog. I decided to choose the latter. My thinking was that art is a creative journey. Indeed, what I have already produced has ultimately led me to this point. It has relevance. Therefore having the element of a ‘backstory’ will help the viewer/reader understand not only where I have been creatively but where I am headed.
Currently my blog is an old one. I designed it with the intention of selling some of my work, but as my teaching commitments increased I no longer had the time to maintain it. It does however serve as a historical reference to my work and may well serve as the basis for some future experimentation.
I wasn’t sure whether or not it was appropriate to include my selling pages on my website? However, as my blog is the primary focus, then it seems less important whether they are there or not. I suspect that as my work develops these pages will undoubtedly change and/or disappear. My intention is that the site will become more concerned with my MA. I also have a long history of reflecting on my work and actively disliking it as my creative knowledge increases.
Reflecting on my site right now, all I can say is that I’m really looking forward to seeing it evolve! I feel that in some respects I have achieved what I set out to do. In the words of Dorothea Lange – ‘pick a theme and work it death, the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate’. The subject I loved was oil on water mixed with light. To me there was something really magical about this medium – indeed I was so fascinated by it I shot literally thousands of images of it. The colour map below is a snap shots of my camera roll where all of the individual images have been reduced down in size. Each colour pixel is actually an image. This in itself paints a picture. Some months I was working with blue tones and some months warmer red tones. I appear to have covered much of the colour spectrum!
I certainly do feel it’s time to move on!
