Now and then I am going to look at a single piece of work, and explain the thought process behind its making. This week I am going to talk about my project Made in England. It is the first of five posts.
I often explain to students that their work is likely to be most effective [...]
It is after midnight and I am back from my assistant Sandra’s birthday party. In the Holloway Road, outside the University, I saw many young women queueing in the snow, their generous frames bulging from a tiny swaddling of baco-foil coloured fabric. ‘Goodness me, they must be cold!’ I thought, troublingly aware that my thoughts [...]
Last day teaching in Oakland. We spent some time puzzling over the relationship between an instinctive approach to the creative process and an intellectual one. Does insisting on the idea of rules informing effective visual communication come across as English and uptight I wonder? Maybe, but the more I teach, and the more time I [...]
Teaching today, at the IMA in Oakland. I arrive at Fruitvale early, and wait for Celeste outside the BART station. I can’t see the IMA truck, so I find myself examining the Bingo Bugle and Classified Flea Market dispensers. What is the Bingo Bugle do you suppose?
Gave a long illustrated lecture about principles of design. [...]
Yesterday I was talking about consciousness raising by torchlight. Today it’s light from a different point of view. It is difficult to convey the importance of light to an image. I don’t mean lighting, which is a wholly different matter, external to the thing itself. I mean the effect of apparent light from within — [...]
I am sure this is obvious to many of you, but perhaps not to everyone. I have spent the weekend teaching a course on Colour and Design. There are many aspects of the course, but I’m going to talk about one, as it is an approach to looking that can be taught. It might seem [...]
Last of a series of four lectures Matt and I gave at City & Guilds Art School today. Preparations burdensome but students lovely. Weekly discussion of current show: Turner and the Masters, Pop Life, Pure Beauty (John Baldessari) and Anish Kapoor. Matt gave context and I analysed structure. Our first experience of teaching together was [...]