Over the course of this year I've created what I think is my best work, and I'm glad I managed to find more applications for it. In the past I might have created work which I thought was strong on its own but I've never felt that I've been able to apply it to different scenarios very easily. My favourite work has always sat in a slightly more fine art side which I always found slightly disconcerting. I felt I wouldn't be able to take in my work in many professional directions, certainly not ones which would make me any money to speak of. This year though I managed to make a fair amount of work I was happy with, which was created with a specific purpose in mind. I still have reservations, and definitely my favourite pieces have been created as part of research/personal projects, but I've managed to reassure myself that editorial work and things like posters are definitely within my grasp.
I've also managed to be much more proactive this year than in the past. I was particularly pleased that I managed to keep working on an extended project (Son House biography) without getting bored or losing momentum, and it is probably the most I've been absorbed by a project that I can remember. I was much less self aware and restrained whilst making it, and whereas I often have tendency to freeze up and agonize over unimportant choices and succumb to option paralysis when I give myself too much freedom, working on this project has helped me loosen up a lot. It also helped me come to quite a concrete decision that limitation is my friend. The less options I give myself, the better the work becomes. I really enjoyed working on irregular/found paper and letting the content of the images dictate their final shapes and dimensions. It really helped me to not to feel hemmed in.
My drawing skills have also improved massively over the course of this year and this has had a big effect on the work I made and want to continue to make. Before I was often using bits of photomontage in my work and even drawing separate pieces in isolation and then collaging my drawings together because I was scared of getting something wrong or ruining something. The fact that I'm more confident with drawing now has developed in conjunction with the idea of limitation, so that now I'm not trying to fit in bits of photograph and photocopied drawings which, despite fitting in my head don't always work out on the paper. I realised I was spending/wasting a lot of time trying to wrangle different elements together. Once I stopped doing that and just started diving in and making work that was self contained, and grew a little more organically, the work improved and everything started flowing much smoother. It also felt a great deal more honest. My approach now feels a lot less contrived.
I still want to try and make more posters because, despite doing a few and being happy with them I feel like there's a lot I could learn still. I particularly want to start studying type a little more, maybe learning some graphic design principles, because I'm still not very confident with it. I would also very much like to learn some more colour theory and start thinking about how to incorporate colour into my work because that's something that I rarely tackle and I think could be a potential game changer somewhere down the line. I also want to try and make a lot more editorial work just to get in the habit of working quickly, not procrastinating and thinking in terms of visual metaphor. I have realised through doing editorial pieces that visual metaphor isn't necessarily the best approach and that tone of voice and representation are just as valid, but I really liked the concept I came up with for the insomnia article. It felt very tidy and satisfying wrapping the article up like that.
I have an interview at the 'Royal drawing School' for the 'Drawing Year' post graduate course they run which would be amazing to get on to. It would be really exciting to have a chance to develop my work through observational drawing practices for a whole year, particularly at this point, when it's become such an integral part of my practice. Other than that though I just really want to make sure that I keep making work and practicing and emailing people, getting my work out there as much a possible.
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