Scruffy and chic
Today I have been working on my website. The coffers are running low, and I need to put some effort into replenishing them. The trouble is that promotion takes time. Getting work photographed is expensive, and circulating it is time consuming. I want to make a gallery of student work for the website as I am sure it would be productive. I think potential students, seeing what can be done, would sign up immediately for courses. But it is slow, difficult and annoyingly expensive to do properly.
I have been teaching for about eighteen years and I am sure the process has taught me as much as it taught the students. I’ve also written a number of books. Sometimes simply making work to demonstrate a design principle can be fun, sometimes it can be challenging. The book design itself (which is out of my control) can be problematic. I have occasionally worked at great length to demonstrate a technique, only to find the design of the book has subsequently destroyed the visual coherence of the image. One characteristic all my books have shared though, is that when a photographer records a finished mosaic, they like to dress the set with a bunch of flowers. It strikes me as curious, what do you think? Here is one I made in the year 2000. I rather like it, as it is a refreshingly scruffy set.
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