Pre-HSS Thoughts
I was asked once again to do some live painting at this year's Humber Street Sesh festival. It's my second time painting at the festival and my third time live painting all together. I feel each time I've done live painting I've learn something new about how I work as a practitioner, and how to better use my skills to produce a piece of work I'm happy with a the end. This year would be a little different as we had a slightly bigger set up to the previous year, and had a gazebo designated purely to our (the artist's live painting) merchandise. I wanted to have a couple of things for sale and display at least for the stall this year, and felt fairly confident and getting some things together.
Merch Prep; Rave Zine
For quite a while now, I have been leaking information on my Rave Zine (produced as part of my practical for COP2) on social media, speaking about how it would be available to buy soon. My Etsy store has been looking dauntingly empty for a while. I uploaded Dear Self in November but since then haven't added anything new, this is largely down to poor time management throughout second year, meaning I had little to no time for personal work (something I WILL make time for in third year). The Rave Zine was something I was really proud of when I completed it (and I got a 1st for the module; hallelujah) and not only that, but it was a story I felt was largely untold. I wanted to give this zine a chance in the open world to educate people, as well as hopefully making them feel something.
And so I took a trip back to Leeds to make use of the ever beautiful and wonderful photocopier in the library. I decided to make ten copies for HSS, and packaged them in clear plastic sleeves with stickers on the front and an A4 'sketchbook page' fold out poster. Actually packaging the zines properly made me feel even more proud of them. The final little tweaks made a huge difference in terms of presentation and professionalism. Something I will take into consideration from here on out.
Merch Prep; Prints
I wanted to have some prints available to buy too, I've wanted to do some more screen and lino prints, however time didn't allow for me to complete these before the festival. Alan (a contact I've had for a couple of years now) pointed me in the direction of Scribes, a digital printing company in Hull, who print 100 high quality A3 colour posters for just £15. Their turn around time was also a couple of days, so they were perfect for what I needed.
When it came down to thinking about what I wanted on the poster, I found myself scurrying back to my personal sketchbooks. I've kept three ongoing throughout the Summer as I find them immeasurably helpful in jotting down ideas, notes, thoughts and scamps for later work. There was a note I'd written down a while ago "You're cute but I don't love you" that kept popping back into my head. My most well received work so far has been drawn from somewhere personal. I sometimes worry that I'm too selfish in my art, creating images more concerned with how I've felt than who else will understand. However I think this is a risk worth taking. I try to be open and honest in my work, and people have often said that is something they admire, it allows them to empathise and interact with the work. In a world full of 'silly illustrations' with 'ooo look a cute pear with shoes on' I want to create art that has something to say, and something to make people feel. So I took the note from my sketchbook and drew up an image I felt fit well.
I am, however, aware that printing 100 copies of this poster, I had to have some confidence in that it would sell and be something people wanted to own. When I'd finished the piece, I ran a poll on my twitter asking which colours worked best, it allowed for a little audience interaction, and for me to gage a better idea of what people wanted. Once the piece was picked, I also used instagram and twitter to post about the build up to it being sold. Here are you options, here is the final design, now it's printed, now I'm signing and numbering them all, here they are available to buy ect.
Live Painting Prep, Thoughts and Concerns
Planning for this piece I knew I wanted to work on board with acrylic paints. Investing in my own good quality paints had made a huge difference in the quality of work I produced this year at Assemble Fest compared with HSS'15. I also found I prefer working on board 110%, it gives me the solidity I need to make the kind of line work and block colours I want to produce.
In terms of subject matter, as with last year, I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. I wanted this piece to be something reflective of what I wanted my practice to be, I wanted to really capitalise on my strengths and produce something I was really happy with. Something I could happily put on my website and say "this reflects where I am now, and suggests where I want to go next". I always like my personal work to say something, and this time I wanted it to be something kind, quite often I think my work can get stuck in a 'sad girl' rut, and I wanted to break that slightly. I wanted to make something in the spirit of the festival itself, something with happiness and passion and a sense of community and care.
My sketchbook work has been really well received when I've placed my images with self written text. I think it's because it gives it an element of intimacy, there's a process of 'none-editing' that keeps it raw and expressive, and I think people enjoy relating to that authenticity. So I chose to create a piece that had both text and image on it, it took a lot of editing to get the words to express what I wanted them to, but it's a piece I personally feel happy with at this point.
My only concern is, will people get it? I feel there's always a risk undertaken with pieces like this, maybe I'm being too overly sentimental or soppy. Perhaps people will take it the wrong way, as something pretentious rather than poetic. It makes me a little nervous taking this piece into the wide world to paint in front of over 30,000 people passing through the festival, but it's a risk I want to take. I want to know if my work can translate the same feeling of honesty on a larger scale painting as it can in the pages of a sketchbook. Working big is something I feel I don't get given the chance to do often, and it's something I really enjoy and would love to do more of. But would my work fit into something larger scale? Could my work fit in galleries? I want to create work that could. I want to create work that everyone can look at and feel something towards. Contemporary Art can sometimes feel inaccessible to a lot of the public, and I'd love to make work that everyone can look at and understand on some level. I just want to allow people to look at art and feel something.
