Annual Blog Post

Well, it's been a year and 15 days (probably 16 by the time I finish writing) since my last blog post. It's not like anybody ever reads it anyway I don't think - most of the feedback seems to be from spambots posting nice comments about where I can source some cut-price viagra.

So, to catch up, this time last year I would've been in the early stages of second year. Second year was a bit crap for various reasons, and I finished up feeling a bit dissatisfied with where I'd ended up, artistically at least. By the end of it, I was really glad to be getting out of GSA for a while, since I'd be going on exchange to the University of New Mexico in the US. I did my usual summer stint at the bike shop, and by mid-August, I found myself in Albuquerque.

Albuquerque is quite a lot warmer than Scotland, though you probably didn't need me to tell you that, right? I got some mental sunburn, especially cycling around trying to find flats spread all across a very expansive city. Eventually, after dodging a few real dumps, I found myself (concidentally) in exactly the same flat that Theresa and Chris from Glasgow had stayed in the year before. The nearest Ikea is all the way up in Denver, so Walmart had to provide the furniture.

The only thing that was kinda worrying me was my class schedule. I'd been advised to take 200-level courses, roughly equivalent to second year at uni. The problem was that there were only two 200-level photography courses, and I hadn't been able to get on early and register for them due to a computer system error, so they were full by the time I got there. Luckily, I managed to beg a spare place on one of them, so I ended up with a timetable consisting of Digital Imaging Techniques, Intro to Printmaking, Modern Art History and History of Photography.

While there are many things I find confusing, bewildering or just plain annoying about the way the American educational system works, perhaps the biggest and most noticeable difference has been that of the workload compared to that of GSA. I find myself with a very frustrating mix - there's a lot more work to do, in terms of volume, but very little of it is particularly challenging.

Admittedly, my printmaking class is pretty challenging, but I put this down to the fact that I've never really had to create decent artworks without the aid of a camera before, and having to rely purely on my clumsy hands leaves me somewhat limited.

My big worry is that I'm going to be somewhat left behind as a photographer when I return to Glasgow. I've been hearing all about the really interesting stuff that people back home have been up to, and all I've been doing is photoshopping daft pictures of penguins looking at abandoned shopping trolleys (I scored a perfect 100% for that assignment by the way).

What I have been doing is trying to keep my own little personal side project on the go, shooting a LOT of Polaroid snapshots as I go along. I guess there's no deeper meaning to these, but they are really good fun (when my camera isn't deciding to spontaneously destroy itself) and definitely go a long way towards trying to keep me at least reasonably sane.

Getting There

Now into my third week of term two, and things aren't quite where I'd like them to be... that's not to say it's all bad though. The good news is, I can now develop and print in colour, which makes me happy - it's something I've wanted to learn for a long time. Admittedly, most of the tricky parts are taken care of by machines, but I still enjoy making the prints in the darkroom.

I'm not too keen on the colour paper though - I'm using Fuji Crystal Archive, as it's apparently the most easy to get regular supplies of. It has that weird plastic feel much like cheap inkjet and resin-coated black and white papers, definitely not too keen. The much nicer feel of fibre-based paper is just one of the many things drawing me back to black and white.

I'm still no further with choosing an aim for this term's work. It seems that with everything I read, and every artist's work that I look at, I just seem to be adding layer upon layer of confusing directions that I'd like to take my work in. I guess all I really need to do now is sit down and try and consolidate these messy thoughts into some kind of coherent form that I can make a body of work based on.

Researching can be dangerous in some ways. I had an idea for some work based on the telephone network equipment that I used to work with on a daily basis. The equipment comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, and degrees of flashy LED illumination, and there's definitely some interesting stuff to be found in telephone exchanges, not to mention their great significance as great unrecognised hubs of social interaction. I'd pre-visualised some of the images I had in mind - what I had wanted to feature in the pictures, and how I wanted them to look. With this idea in mind, you can only imagine how it felt when I discovered Lewis Baltz had made a set of almost perfectly identical images in the early 1990s... Damn!

I have to wonder how things might've turned out had I not discovered this Baltz body of work. I wonder about whether I could've confidently forged ahead unknowing, and produced work I was genuinely happy with; whether I could've exhibited the work without anybody ever noticing, or whether I'd even get the chance to hear viewers making the snide "he's just ripping off Baltz" comments. Mysteries indeed. Either way, I'm not sure I can feel confident in going ahead and making that set of images knowing there's something so close to my intentions already out there.

As it stands, I've cobbled together a couple of things that I might look into. One that's standing forward in my mind is the idea of the Scottish colour palette. I'd been looking at Joel Meyerowitz's Cape Light series, along with the work of Stephen Shore (among others) and really getting this feel for a very American type of light. I'd noticed this in New Zealand too - that the light had a very different quality about it. Scottish light is something special though, never does light get so incredibly flat and featureless. It has an incredible ability to absolutely suck the life and colour out of any given scene.

At first, this was of great frustration for me as a photographer in my early days. I was a big fan of high-saturation film, especially Kodak 160VC, and it made for some really crappy looking pictures when the light was flat. Trying to push out tons of contrast on overcast days just led to some really disappointing images. I almost wouldn't bother leaving the house some days if the skies were cloudy. On a recent trip up through the north-west of Scotland, I started beginning to appreciate this flat light as something very fundamental to the Scottish way of life.

Being Scottish is something I quite often have problems with. On one hand, I do find a lot of the landscapes, places and people very inspiring; but on the other hand, there's nothing that pisses me off quite like stupid nationalism (Scottish or otherwise), and the last thing I would want to do would be to take postcard shots of beautiful mountains and for anyone to get this idea that I was a full-blown proud Scot, because I'm most certainly not that.

The Beginning of What's About to Happen

Today was the first day back at art school again after working all summer. Was good to see all the people I hadn't been able to see over the summer, although in truth it felt like we'd hardly been away any time at all.

The big thing this term is colour photography. I'm kinda excited about the prospect of learning about colour developing and printing, although not so sure how enthusiastic I am about working in colour. I seem to have developed a bit of an attachment to black and white, something about it just seems right to me. However, it's always pretty good to be able to push my personal boundaries, so I guess I'll just need to see how it all looks once I get the ball rolling.

My biggest worry was a potential shortage of ideas coming into the year - I had grand plans of using my summer in order to investigate and begin initial developments into ideas for photographic projects; although with the joys of working full time, this didn't really happen. Thankfully, a lecture from our year tutor gave us quite a few useful starting points to have a look at. It definitely makes generating ideas a lot easier when you've got some good people to rip off - lots of further digging into a few names needed I think. I'm certainly not reluctant to say that I thought quite a lot of the images were total crap as well, but such are the joys of being an opinionated bastard sometimes.

I guess my next task is more reading. I have Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art on loan, and Susan Sontag's On Photography waiting on my bookshelf. Think I'll need to give Chromophobia by David Batchelor another run over too - it made for quite interesting reading, but a wee refresher with more of a look specifically at where my project's aims are would be pretty handy I think.

Let's see what happens next.

Fandan

You may have noticed it's been quite a while since I last posted a blog entry. This is very bad of me, and a bad habit I seem to get into from time to time - just plain forgetting to keep things up to date.

Since my last post in November, I've undertaken a pretty big step with my photography. I'm now studying towards a BA in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, and it's great. I'm now about three quarters of the way through the first year of the course, and actually amazed how time has flown by, seems like no time at all since I first appeared there.

Before I arrived at the Art School, I wasn't really sure what the hell to expect. I'd not managed to go on any of the open days because I'd been in New Zealand, and my only experience of the school had been a few visits to the degree shows. My last experience of any formal art education had been in my standard grade art class at high school, back in 2001 or thereabouts, and even at that I wasn't very great.

Anyway, in spite of the nerves beforehand, I've been managing to cope pretty well so far I reckon. The stuff along the lines of theory and history were what I was most worried about, but thankfully the essays have been pretty short for that, and I don't mind presentations too much.

The general working environment has been quite interesting to get used to as well. Having come from a very task-based environment as an engineer, it's been a bit weird getting used to the more free-flowing way of working in a studio with a pretty open timetable. I have to say, I definitely enjoy the freedom, but it does sometimes make it pretty tricky trying to force yourself to get work done when things are quiet.

The people are good, and a lot easier to get on with than I had expected. Admittedly, there are very few (if any) people who share my taste for a spot of Slayer, but it's nice to be surrounded by lots of people with lots of interesting ideas and different viewpoints. I don't see myself putting on the skinny jeans and buying dubstep records just yet, but being one of those art school fandans isn't quite so bad after all...