Sunday 17 February 2013

Updates and Portraits

So, after a 2 month blog absence (uh-oh!), let's get the ball rolling with some Important Updates:

  • I finally bought a proper domain name, so you can find me at www.rumade.co.uk (go on, type it into your URL bar right now!). Eventually, when I can find the money and the right web designer, I will have a proper website and this blog will be archived on there along with proper portfolios and lord knows what else.
  • As of this morning, I am on Twitter! It's going to be a networking tool for me, and maybe a vehicle for stalking celebrities. When I get my new phone I'll be able to blab all I want on there.
  • My degree show dates have been confirmed as Wed 19th-Sun 23rd June. Scary! Our degree show has a facebook page which you can like for updates.
  • I have become an informal intern to Anna Barlow, the artist I profiled in second year who makes fantastic ceramic food items. This means that when she needs me to, I come over to her studio and help her out with little jobs like making tiny sweets out of porcelain!
And now that's out of the way...

Yesterday, I went into uni to pack up my work from last term. No one else was there- nearly all the 3rd years are either in Frankfurt or Paris at the moment. My coffee date for the afternoon had cancelled so I had nothing to do all day (except go home and clean or go for another 8k run, and who wants that?). Luckily, help was on hand in the form of Joshua Press, a local artist who I'd seen in the Camden New Journal who had been invited to paint in the public space at the front of CSM, as part of an ongoing... thing... called Black Maria which I have been happily ignoring every day on my way in.

So I hung out there and watched a friend of Josh get her portrait painted, and then sat for my own one.

I love Josh's style with the bold, faceted sections and fairly muted colours. Think I may have freaked him out a little bit with how still I can sit though! It was a great experience, a few other artists were hanging around so we chatted away about art and education and languages and all sorts.

The painting in the middle on plywood is the one I watched come into creation:

I wish I'd got a better photo of the earlier one, the un-primed plywood Josh painted on gave a really cool effect to the brushstrokes, where the bled into the cracks in the wood.

Afterwards we went back to the Cob Gallery, which is where he is based, and hung out for a bit with Hayden, another artist working there. It was uplifting to be around non-ceramicists for once, I hate to say it but it's true. Sometimes when you're stuck in a studio with no natural light, no connection to the outside world, and surrounded by the same (disclaimer: lovely!) people, it can make you feel rather trapped and stuck in a rut. Just spending a day removed from that has been really helpful.

I will try to update y'all on my own work soon- some of it needs another firing because it didn't go high enough. It's hard for me to update at the moment as halfway through my dissertation my laptop committed suicide and I had to buy a netbook which doesn't have the best processing capabilities. I know, I know, excuses, excuses.