On Friday, our lecture was divided into two pieces: a lecture/storytelling session of our turning points/wider context of our/our tutor’s work and an ADAS workshop to talk about the main piece of writing we will do for stage II, an essay about a contemporary practitioner within our specialism.
In the first part we were tasked with identifying parts of our practice that made us shift our practice in some way. For me, that answer is certainly based in technology over anything else. When I started drawing on the iPad, the notion of what I could do and the pace by which I could produce it totally changed. Before, I had used visuals mainly as a tool for creating beautiful, physical objects: paintings. I was quite precious and exact about trying to get the image to be as correct as possible–stuck in a physicality of painting. The blank canvas/page was quite intimidating to me, as was the notion of being alone in a studio for hours on end. The loneliness of the images’ existence in one spot in a home/gallery somewhere also wasn’t particularly appealing to me.
However, working digitally flipped all of that. Somehow the pace of working on an iPad has allowed me to break free of working for exactness. In fact, somehow the shift to digital has allowed me to much more whimsical in what I create: parodies, cartoons, and other silly images–this is perhaps partially because I know that my output is largely going to be social media/the internet. Figure painting used to be about my relationship to the people that I was painting, and the paintings would often be given to the subjects themselves. However, the images that I create digitally are about concepts, jokes, and content for people who I don’t know.
In a way, these digital images become the actualization of a type of writing that is best executed visually for readability, and how my ‘hand’ affects it is sort of secondary to that readability. In terms of style, digitally, I am consequently somewhat of a chemelion.
However, when looking at the larger context of people who have had gained access to digital drawing, I am only one in a much larger community of artists and designers, who are no longer primarily making visuals for printed magazines, but for screens. In fact, a good chunk of the cartoonists that I know primarily draw on iPads.
It was interesting to hear other people’s turning points as well. Some people also had technological breakthroughs that totally shifted their approaches. Others were affected by life events/political movements/books or places that they had travelled. With small groups we made a map of how these points intersected/connected.
We all seemed to connect with the idea of community having an impact on the kind of work that we make. There is a shift in the tone when our own environment or our audience environment changed such that our relative identity and responsibility have a different context/bear a different social responsibility. Technology has enabled a connectedness in a way that bypasses the physical environment, but we still largely agreed that the local communities were still vastly important to that internal change.
It is interesting, given that the RCA is its own micro community and audience. Consequently, it makes sense that we have all seen a shift in our work here. Looking forward, it is especially important to consider.
RCA Graduate Diploma 