Wednesday, January 7
Christmas is over and the return to regular scheduling has arrived. College started again yesterday and thanks to my foresight of getting up at 10am on Monday I managed to rise at 7am with little fuss. The tutor gave us a new brief to work on, to do with image manipulation, "and I don't mean by using Photoshop," he pointed out. We have to explore photograms, negative sandwiches, double exposure, damaged negatives, other specified techniques I can't remember the names of, and a combination of these. It's quite interesting as, except for the photograms, it's an area I have no experience with. And thus I have an excuse if my work is shit. He asked us to collect some translucent objects to use in the photograms for next week, but I'm having difficulty thinking of appropriate objects. There's net curtains I suppose. He said that cling film was always useful. Two girls in the class were drawing patterns on tracing paper using permanent marker which seemed like quite a good idea. There's my curtains in my living room which have a net curtain-effect to them and have butterflies sewn on, but I don't really want to traipsing those into college and back again just for one inconsequential picture. I think I'll go to a haberdashers and see what kind of things I can find - lace, sequins and so on. I already have some feathers I can use. Everybody else was creating photograms using the CD's they had with them but that seems a little obvious to me, though one boy did create a very nice effect as you could see the writing on the CD on the print he made from it.
We were also given a deadline for our coursework essays. The whole thing has to done and finished and handed in by March 2nd. Eeep! He wants one third of it in within two weeks, preferably more. We talked about my idea to abandon looking at Florence Henri and to change to Richard Kern instead but he said that it would be a bad idea as there's no way I could manage to sufficiently mention the pornography aspect of the images in the word limit we have, and the porn side would be essential to mentioning. So Ms Henri it is then. I started trying to read the book I own about her last night but it made my head hurt. So many mentions of art movements I have very little knowledge about, of artists I've mostly never heard of, cities I'm unacquainted with. And when it tried to explain and analyse the work I became completely lost. I sense I may be in at the deep end considering how little time I have to complete the essay. Even more so when the first third needs to be done in twelve days and Rory will be here for ten of those. Oops.
09:50
