Opening-Day Talk: Painting in the Present Tense​Walker Art Centre.

Interesting interview with contemporary British painter, Glenn Brown. ​http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/int​erview-glenn-brown/

https://drawingandcognition.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/us-spring-loaded-drawing-retreat/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: International Drawing & Cognition Research and Education
http://www.parulgupta.org/-phenomenology-of-perception-2015.html


Another great resource for the practitioner and researcher.
http://www.c4rd.org.uk/C4RD/Recently_at_C4RD/Recently_at_C4RD.html

DRAWinternational: http://www.draw-international.com/
A centre for action, research and experimentation in art and design.

What are your thoughts on drawing? Here are my thoughts in the context of research.

My approach to drawing is fluid, spontaneous and intuitive, exploring the space in which materiality links process and practice. As a tacit language, drawing is both the subject and object of my abstract visual ideas, which are conceptually framed within a language of resistance and representation.

Embodied in a Celtic cultural context, the works refer to the phenomena of migration referencing a personal itinerant history as well as the broader history of mass migration from an Irish/Scottish perspective. Drawing, as such, is a felt experience that blends practice and theory, the conscious and unconscious, absence and presence.

Expanding drawings visual literacy is an important characteristic of my creative research and studio practice that function through a multidisciplinary lens, encompassing aspects of painting, printmaking and fibre textiles. An interdisciplinary approach to drawing has assisted in the development of a personal drawing methodology that employs wet and dry materials and hand made knitted surfaces to recreate woven surfaces that evoke a sensory aesthetic that is culturally specific.

​In combining conventional and new material methodologies in the practice of drawing it is my intention to advance my creative practice and material knowledge and further challenge drawings traditional boundaries through overlapping empiricism with the language of drawing. In contextualising drawing within this framework, drawing is in a state of becoming and can be translated as ‘anything’. As such, drawing has the capacity to expand its own place within the canon of Western Art through material knowledge building, which in effect contributes to finding meaning and understanding.

So another year is over and the bells have heralded in the new year - 2016. Four days down and another 361 days of creativity to go before we sing the praises of how our time was spent or mis-spent during this forthcoming year.

Personally, I am looking forward to 2016 - I shall be returning to my native Glasgow in August with a view to participating in a creative/artistic venture - [ more news to follow]. I shall also be participating in the artist in residency program at Boxhill Community Art Centre, Melbourne in November where I shall be facilitating a 'So You Think You Can't Draw' series of classes during my stay. The residency shall also provide the time and space to continue my  two year drawing project that is entitled AM730. The project examines the concept of meaning and place through my physical engagement with the local environment and how its material identity impacts the process of artistic practice. The contextual premise of the project is to deconstruct the material qualities of the traditional space of negotiation, the drawing surface and recreate through an experimental lens a series of works that reflect the process driven nature of the activity of drawing, its material history, past and present. 

​In terms of my artistic writing, I shall continue to develop a practice based response to the discursive question already in phase : The artist as researcher’s primary problematic: Why is it so difficult to legitimise visual research outside of the specificity and practice of the written word? 

Rabbit Skin and Gesso's art education talks - coursework, mentoring and artistic support shall be in a state of continuum during 2016.

In conclusion, have a great year fellow creatives and should you require specific information relating to creative practice as a research tool - contact me direct.

Cheers
​AM

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