Studio Critique

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Oil paint on burlap, aluminium, plywood, driftwood, paper and canvas on a white wall.

The requirement was to present one completed work shown in the way it is intended to be seen.

What is it saying to the viewer? To understand what I am trying to communicate. How can we engage with it’s meaning? What is the physical nature of the work? Does this embody meaning?

The format of the critique was within 30 minutes the group of 5 students and a tutor would spend the first 5 minutes looking at the work considering the interior of the work and in what context does it fit into. The artist who made the work says nothing until the last 5 minutes of the session. This is to allow the work to speak for itself as if in a gallery situation, when the artist is not present to explain the work.

What I would like to achieve? A sense of place. The physical experience of my surroundings. My subject is of my own experiences. A memory of the elements of the sea and wind which are forever present.

I had a positive and informative feedback. Abstracted panels carefully placed together in a rectangle to create one landscape. An abstract way of depicting the landscape. Creating a feeling of fluidity, mediative, space and a calming. Water. The work is hung too low.

Putting the work in context, Sigmar Polke and his use of materials and ‘Ring of Saturn’ by WG Sebald generating different thoughts through walking.

It was a surreal experience sitting in a room observing people scrutinising your work but very rewarding.

MA Research

Anslem Kiefer is a painter that infuses the landscape genre achieving the most powerful effects of meaning and interest. Kiefer’s work has different strands of meaning, themes taken from myth, legend, religion and political history. He takes complex ideas and puts them into a single coherent image, using a pictorial language the viewer can understand.

In my research I am interested that other German artists have recently exhibited in the UK, Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz and currently a retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern.