Featured image made in text-to-image AI Dall-ee using the prompts cats, library, Chagall.

This is where I’ll record odds and ends such as OCA sessions put on by staff, items coming under the ‘Creative Conversations’ umbrella, external courses, best books, documents (there’s a task requiring the development of a glossary which seems to be generic rather than essay specific), and other items that don’t necessarily merit a post but need to be listed somewhere.

This is my list of books, so good I bought them twice – once as audible publications, then as paperbacks for reference.

12 Bytes: how we got here, where we might go next by Jeanette Winterson. This was fun and lively and wickedly well informed about the history of women’s exclusion from most things to almost everyone’s detriment. The hard copy is on order; I’ll update with details when it arrives.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. Published by Vintage in 2019, this is a series of quick-fire essays demonstrating the women-shaped gaps in thinking in every sphere of industry and enterprise, from the voice activated technology that doesn’t respond to female voices to the stab vests built for the default male that squash women’s breasts and come up short, leaving their abdomens exposed. This book puts much of art history in context in terms of the question of women’s art. It isn’t there because of the pervasive default male which excluded women from educational, social, and aspirational opportunities.

What are you looking at? 150 Years of Modern Art in the Blink of an Eye by Will Gomperz. Published by Penguin Random House in 2012, this was my go-to book for getting some sort of grip on recent art history. Quick but never glib and not a sniff of art-speak. It’s another on my Audible carousel.

Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel. Published by Back Bay Books in 2018, this is a blend of social history, women’s history, the history of contemporary art, and some tragic human stories. It informs and entertains although it’s heavily fictionalised, the narrator speaking from a position of authority as though she were present at intimate conversations and encounters, which she clearly was not. That in mind, I cycle the audible version through frequently to learn passively something I would otherwise skip gaily past. The women are Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.

How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford. Published by The Bridge Street Press in 2020, this is another of those grounding books that take irrational thinking about rational things, in this case numbers, and shows how mistakes are made and how to think differently about them. It’s about rationality but it’s funny, clever, and settling in a way that allows me to give space to the more esoteric elements of this course.

Humble Pi: a comedy of maths errors by Matt Parker is similar. As yet, it hasn’t merited a hard copy as I’m still trotting through the Audible version. Published by Penguin Books Ltd in 2019, one of its descriptors is ‘humour’.

The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel (2022). This is an entertaining gallop through the contribution of women to art over the centuries. There are many, often presented in mainstream art literature as the wives of or models of someone more famous because he was a man. Sometimes men stole their work by allowing it to be misattributed or did a handbrake turn on their opinion of the skill and value of a painting after discovering it was painted by a woman. I have the Audible version so I can listen while I do routine things, but I also have it on Kindle so I can relate the images to the text and access the wonderful timeline at the end.

Navigating the Art World: professional practice for the early career artist. Murphy, B. and Thomson, N.J.S. (2020). Delphian. My Goodreads (5*) review: Penetrates the pretension; castrates the artifice; fixes the gaseous flan flummery; and neuters the empty fog of hot air. If any book deserves raw language in praise of its uncompromising readability and honesty, it’s this one but I’m guessing that might get the review binned and maybe me banned so here’s the version that won’t – this book is a straight talking, readable, pocket-sized, navigation aid for new artists guaranteed to keep us out of the bogs of supercilious vacuity. Get it.

Steal like an Artist. Kleon, A. 2012. Workman Publishing Company. I reviewed this too (5*), but rather more succinctly! “Handy little tips and tricks motivator.”

Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook – comments by Henry Moore and Kenneth Clark. Published by Thames and Hudson (reprint 2017), The sketchbook is dated 1998 copyright The Henry Moore Foundation, while the text by Clark is dated 1980. The paper has that rough quality of old sketchbooks, making it feel authentic and raw. Sketchbooks aren’t glossy and ‘finished’ (mine aren’t anyway!), they’re scruffy and impromptu. Moore knows his sheep.

Creative Conversations. These are tutor-led discussions with small groups of level 3 students. You sign up and pitch up via your webcam.

Material Research with Amy Tidmarsh and Doug Burton. This took place in July 2022 which was before I began the course, so I accessed the recording. This is the link https://learn.oca.ac.uk/mod/page/view.php?id=19923 but you need to be an OCA student to get in.

Curation and Collaboration. Helen Warburton (Photography) and Rachel Smith (Creative Arts) talk about these creative strategies in relation to their own practices and how they can be utilised to develop creative work. December 13th, 2022. Interesting if labour intensive, reliant on communities, and heavy on cost. Luckily, they seemed to like my AR approach which is none of those things. Both very successful career artists. It takes real energy to generate and maintain that amount of enterprise.

The Padlet. Supposedly a place where follow-up conversations from the live sessions take place but which seems mostly to comprise people making their first post as instructed. I’ve never had a response to anything I’ve posted on a padlet, whether a primary post or a comment on someone else’s post, and this one seems no different.

There’s a new one as of now (found it last night 22/11/2022). Not much there at present though.

Additional online learning experiences

FutureLearn: Lights, camera, computer, action: how digital technology is transforming film, tv, and gaming. Short course via University of York and Future Learn, September 2022. Here is my post following that free, three week course. FutureLearn course and other resources – Practice and Research (wordpress.com)

OCA in-house painting seminars led by Tom Palin and Clare Wilson. The first of these was with Tom (27/09/2022) who talked about romanticism, the picturesque, and classicism. For all the reasons in the books above, the artists were exclusively men, and as far as I could tell, also White. We tried to place ‘bucolic’ on the realism/mysticism spectrum and came up with ‘safe for your dining room wall’! The second, focusing on Realism leading to Impressionism and Fauvism, was on October 11th, and I was pleased to see that the women gap had been filled so thank you Tom! This was an impressive gallop through a lot of artists, styles, and connections, made utterly absorbing by Tom’s enthusiasm. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he knew all these people personally, probably went to school with them, out on the razz on a Friday night and stumbling home arms over each other’s shoulders, in the early hours. He should have a TV series, that kind of life is gold dust. Clare’s brought the content up to date with more conceptual and abstract material in another totally immersed, lively session. It’s always such a bonus hearing people talk about the thing they love most and have such a connection with because it brings that thing to life. I am still somewhat baffled by very abstract pieces when I don’t have a clue why it has the title it has, if it has one. Sometimes I still struggle wondering why something is ‘good’ when I can see nothing in it.

Case study interviews. Some of these are in-house, Amy Tidmarsh, for instance, discussing her use of sketchbooks (Research Diagrams and Physical Research Discussion). They look much more like my large notebooks than my sketchbooks but they are much more tidy than anything at all of mine! Tidmarsh is very hands-on and physical about her work, using her own body to understand more about the materials she’s using. There’s an unexpected amount of technical drawing and engineering involved. Link for OCA students https://learn.oca.ac.uk/mod/page/view.php?id=15850

Les Monaghan, photographer. Detailed account of his efforts to get images relating to homelessness installed in free spaces; the resistances and welcomes he received, the leg-work, the DIY making of hanging equipment, printing, the building of things if you don’t have a budget to pay someone else, the time giving talks, the travel, the transportation. It sounds like an enormous outlay for no return. Lots of subsequent invitations to other libraries but still no funding. This isn’t viable. Art is work and certainly everything he describes is work. You wouldn’t get a decorator to work for free in your public building. This sounds so much like the ‘exposure’ invitations by journals to writers, by events to musicians and photographers. They pay the caterers but not the band. Monaghan is brutally honest in his reflections on this process. Link for OCA students https://learn.oca.ac.uk/mod/page/view.php?id=15854

Level 3 Painting meetings led by Emma Drye. Found my first one on November 22nd (2022), attended by many of the people I’d just seen in the group tutorial minutes before. Oddly, this doesn’t appear in the official calendar.

Group Tutorials

22nd November 2022. Due to a failure of Tom’s technology which left him without audio input or output, this was curtailed, but as I’d been first up, I got a very good and incisive critique particularly from Tom who remarked on some resonances with Francis Bacon which someone else had mentioned earlier. He also made positive comments about the stylised and ‘frozen’ nature of the images which was an impression I’d been aiming for. I’d said that I was looking for feedback in particular about my use of pastels because this had been my first time using them as the primary medium. Some people seemed surprised at this, which was gratifying, and Tom encouraged me to take that further, particularly as I’d mentioned how the series had begun rather overworked and had become much less so as it went on. I can see some scope with this, although I doubt I’ll be persuaded to go full-on pastel paper because I like scale and grubbiness, and an obvious benefit to that is the much lower cost. We actually spent quite a lot of time discussing boxing and the impact on brain function of repeated concussions which is what I would hope to happen should these pieces be exhibited. Today (23rd November 2022) I tracked down a painting Tom suggested I look at, and simultaneously demonstrated the superiority of Google over Bing. Tom repeated the title twice but all I got was a phonetic representation. From ‘Stagnant Status boxing painting’ Bing gave me puddles and several other irrelevancies, but Google got straight in with ‘Stag at Sharkey’s’. It’s brutal, primitive, visceral, and dynamic and comes from the illegal boxing world of the late 1800s/early 1900s. It’s also an exquisite painting with unfussy strokes of paint and suggestions of muscle, skin, people, features, that need no more delineation. It’s here https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1922.1133#

17th January 2023. Again with Tom but this time without any other group members so again I had a personal critique of two pieces of work. These were of the same subject; a waterhole at dusk in the Namib desert as viewed through live stream webcam, but using different media. I’d planned to ask the group for thoughts about how each of them worked, given their stark differences (https://conboyhillpracticeandresearch.wordpress.com/2022/12/17/webcam-view-namib-desert/), but the onus for that fell on Tom. Intriguingly, he seemed to prefer the bright pastel version to the very dilute acrylic piece which he thought felt like a sketch. This is the direct opposite of my view, the pastels seeming overly bright and verging on Disney while the muted, thin acrylics reflected more of the atmosphere of the reality just as the camera switches to night mode.

Level 3 studio meetings

16th December with Emma. Asked about the dissertation, assuming it straddled 3.1 and 3.2, but it may be in two parts – a literature review (3.1) and the dissertation (3.2) – which isn’t what I’d understood. Emma’s arranging a meeting with me, Clare, and Christian(?) in January.

This has been resolved and now places the dissertation firmly in 3.2, at least in terms of completion and assessment, while the written piece for 3.1 has only the word count as a requirement (2500) and, by agreement, can be a description of the process of writing and making art.

The January meeting wasn’t well publicised for some reason and only one person turned up. That wasn’t me despite checking in the usual places.

There has been a rhythm to these meetings since, all taking place on the 22nd of each month at 4pm, no matter the day of the week. It’s an opportunty to see who else is on the course and raise questions with Emma. On one occasion, there were just two of us so we were able to monopolise the session half and half in turns.

Peer-led critique group

This is a multi-pathway group of students that’s been meeting monthly by Zoom since April 2021. Even as a small group, our input comes from Drawing, Painting, and Fine Art, and all three Levels. We’re learning from each other and from attending tutor-led groups about critique and about appreciation/liking, although at a guess I’d say we tend not to ask for thoughts about where to go with a piece we’ve presented. Luckily, we’re not averse to offering ideas and making suggestions prompted by thoughts about what we might do with it, and some of these seem fruitful. We’re also a support group where it’s safe to say I’m fed up, I’ve lost my mojo, I don’t know what I’m doing on this course. We’ve all been there.

The most recent meeting covered a lot of ground in supportive terms as some had come to the end of a module and were waiting for assessment and others had just picked up after a break. One person who left OCA but stayed with the group while doing a less formal course, is thinking of coming back, particularly remarking on how far we had all come in terms of our ability to discuss and critique in an atmosphere of mutual trust, support, and humour. This, I think, is what is missing from the formal critiques – we don’t know each other, we don’t really know the tutor, and because trust has not been established, there’s no room for the fluidity of humour that eases conversations along and tempers the serious stuff. Group work 101.

Recently, I’ve shown my virtual gallery there and described the process. The result is a new gallery for members of the group which, when I have all the necessary words to go with everyone’s work, will be launched with virtual wine and cheese. For at least one of us, it will fulfill a course requirement of collaborative work, curation, and/or putting work into a public space. For me, it’s an exploration of virtual space combined with AR embedded physical/digital work. And I have made my first 3D model which, unfortunately, the platform seems unable to import with colour and texture. 3D modelling is on my list of skills to get to grip with in the near future.

This continues to be the most valuable of all the support and supplementary possibilities, probably due to our established relationships and confidcne in communication. We are smaller than when we began but with a newer addition and the same supportive, fun, ethos.

Artists’ Talks

David McGuire, 30th November 2022. On my ice dance scale of marks for technical merit and artistic impression, David achieved a full house for his unbelievable attention to detail, a realism that avoided photorealism by its colours which exceeded the normal by enough to glow and be vibrant but without edging into fantasy, and an enormously astute eye for composition based on the ordinary of an entropic industrial area. He knows those places and it shows because he treats them with respect but never idealises. It’s no wonder his work is selling so well.

Anna Barnard, 7th December 2022. I found this style difficult to rate on my ice dancing scale because I’d have to set aside my preference for something a little less ill-defined and naïve, but when it comes to light and colour, Anna really brings the prize home. This turns out to be an understatement as she has, with mouse-like under-selling of herself, got work into a string of galleries and offers of solo exhibitions here there and possibly everywhere. My only contribution to the session was to offer advice to another student baffled by Instagram but keen to join.

There have been other sessions which, had they not disappeared from the calendar, would be listed here. Personal circumstances meant having limited time available to keep track of details and I’d hoped to pick those up retrosectively.

Howard Andrews (I think) in July 2023 with his remarkably detailed drawings/paintings of pebbles. There was insight there into the work involved in putting a show together.

Podcasts

The Lonely Palette. August 2022. Tamar Avishai interviews Dr Chalotte Mullins, Art Critic and Broadcaster. Bonus episode 06. The episode discusses Mullins’s book ‘A Little History of Art’ published by Yale University Press, which I have ordered today (October 10th) and will probably have more to say about later. For now, I understand it to be a rapid, unpretentious gallop through 1000 years of art in 300 pages, the central theme being, if I have the gist of the discussion right, that both galleries and art books have a tendency to put people off so something different is required. Lost is the opportunity for galleries to frame visitors as time travellers, viewing instances of art as if through the eyes of its contemporaries – smell the studios, feel the size of canvases, imagine the streets outside, be there in those shoes. Books alienate by using language that excludes anyone who is not already an aficionado, almost as if art will somehow lose its value if everyone can read what it’s about.

I was interested to hear science cited as an example of how to dump stuffiness and make difficult subjects fun. Science has been doing this for decades so I’m delighted art is beginning to adopt the same approach. No one loses respect for experts just because they’re using a vocabulary that’s understandable in a way that’s engaging, but they do avoid situations where incomprehensibility seems to be rewarded and asking for clarification looked down on.

The Lonely Palette. September 2022. Tamar Avishai interviews Adam Gopnick, critic with the New Yorker. Bonus episode 7. This follows a very similar theme to the episode above; questioning the history of art as the preserve of people who ‘know’ [presumably where ‘know’ means opinion expressed as fact].

The Beautiful Brain. 2019. Podcast by Hana Walker-Brown. Boxing isn’t mentioned directly but very tellingly, ‘boxer’s brain’ is used as the damage standard in several instances by coroners and other officials when comparing the brains or behaviour of women victims of domestic abuse, and people affected by concussive injury in other sports. ‘Punch drunk’ is the term used. Available on Audible.

The Delicate Game (2022) is a second podcast by Walker Brown and also addresses brain injury and sport. This contains much of the material from the previous podcast/book but contains a whole chapter on boxing and also what’s termed ‘pink concussion’ which refers to the barely described impact of brain injury on women. There’s more here now about women in sport and the fact that recovery from concussive and sub concussive incidents taking longer than in men, and the incidence now being diagnosed in victims of domestic abuse, replacing a framework of emotional reaction to the abuse. The ‘punch drunk’ woman was the first in a long line of realisation, mostly by male doctors, that memory loss, disorientation, and the like were not characteristics of women generally as they age but of women who had been regularly and frequently beaten around the head for years.

Sources of inspiration.

Film: opening titles such as Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon and Westworld (see Art of the Title), and now 1899 where Tobias Gronbeck Anderson is credited as the designer, although there’s a massive FX crew as you’d expect from an FX-heavy series. (see IMDB).

This woman, Katie Paterson. Brought to my attention by another art-free zone, BBC’s radio 6Music with Maryanne Hobbs. Wisely, they didn’t discuss visual art that much but focused on an audio recording Katie Paterson had made while a student at the Slade, apparently missing her exams due to getting a microphone fixed into a glacier to record melting ice and making that available to anyone with the phone number. That was in 2007 and she really hasn’t stopped being geological, cosmological, astrological, and phenomenological since. This is the Vimeo recording of the ice: https://vimeo.com/668282902, and this is her website: https://katiepaterson.org/

News Articles

Boxing is a mess: the darkness and damage of brain trauma in the ring. Donald McRae, The Guardian, 2021.

Sport-induced traumatic brain injury: families reveal the ‘hell’ of living with the condition. Matthew Smith, Adam John White, and Keith Parry. The Conversation. November 15th 2022.

Families of athletes with dementia linked to brain trauma on watching somebody you love disappear – Uncharted Brain podcast part 2. Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware. The Conversation. November 16th 2022.

Miscellaneous

Tronie. I came across this word for the first time this morning (30.11.2022) in reference to ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ (Vermeer, 1665) via @CulturalTutor on twitter. It sounds remarkably 21st century.

Projects/Assignments

Project 1. Submitted ~ 4th October 2022, feedback received 12th October 2022.

Project 2. Submitted ~ 26th November 2022 by Tom Palin following group tutorial on 22nd November. Reported an error of allocation re reference to my being on Ideas Lab 2.1 module. This has been rectified.

Project 3. Submitted as Project 2 (see above) due to not being certain what the conflicting messages on my dashboard meant. Resubmitted by the official route on December 13th, albeit after a few mis-hits due to cantankerous technology.

Project 4. Group tutorial. Completed 17th January 2023. Report received.

Project 5. Virtual gallery, reflective account by audio, selected material from the dissertation prep. Submitted 1st February 2023. Tutorial scheduled for 15th February. Tutorial completed February 7th.

Project 6. Submitted 6th April 2023. Tutorial scheduled for April 11th and completed.

Project 7. Submitted 6th May 2023. Tutorial scheduled for May 10th and completed.

Project 8. Submitted Tutorial scheduled for June 21st and completed.

Project 9 is a group tutorial scheduled for July 25th.