Reflective Practice: Lucy Day

I had a really productive conversation with Lucy Day about my practice and she was able to give me some pointers for particular areas. She said she responded to the looseness of the most recent work, the previous unit's work was too contained. She gave me some advice about photographing my work and how the angles and cropping needed to represent the work better as this would make a real difference to how people encounter my work.
She liked the tumbling house falling, and the darker palette which created a sense of foreboding, unease and menace. She said I should think about the compositions first - not sure what this means from my notes as I always start with composition.
We spoke about open studios and how it is important to target my audience and push my networks. My statements are good and match with the work! She gave me ideas about what to include on an artist CV for exhibition entries - to include a 100 word version of my artist statement. Make it professional, be confident. She said not to push the current work much further. Apparently painting is coming back into fashion (hooray!) - she gave me a number of artists to look at (below)...

Notes from Lucy from our talk:
We talked about her painting technique and composition. Had good open
conversation about some of the tighter paintings as I prefer her much looser
ones as they seem to relate more to her ideas of menace, unease, manipulation.
She is experimenting with the medium and there is a danger that the
composition can lose ground through this experimentation. Also talked about
how she has documented the work as they will need to be re-done as they don’t
do justice to the work ( bad angles so distorting the canvas a lot). She raised
concerns about CV’s and the whether open studios were of value so we talked
through how to develop your audience by targeting key people for visits for
example.

Reflection
Really pleased with how this meeting went, I felt it was very positive. I am so much better at talking about my work and ideas now than I was a year ago that I feel confident to begin to try for more exposure for my work. The photography comment is a fair point - I am already sorting this out. I also realised that I am far less sensitive and defensive about my work - Lucy kept saying she was being really harsh but I used the feedback she gave me to think about another aspect of my practice. I am trying to strike a balance between loose and structured (composition); as I have come from a point where my work has been faint and fluid, and the last unit's work extremely tight in comparison, I am shifting between these too states. I'm not ready yet to stop pushing the work but I going to experiment with leaving some areas more loose and evidence of some drawing.

One Month Reflection

Artists recommended by Lucy during our chat...
Geraldine Swayne
http://geraldineswayne.org/
Camilla Horn Large