PhD Practice Options

Portrait Practice - Issues that are important to me

The painted portrait from life -I paint directly from life rather than from photographs in all my work, particularly portraits. This makes paintings a time based medium. Recording the human response to the subject over the time it is painted in. 

Being a human response rather than 'mechanical' means that it is subjective; effected by the emotions of the painter and the relationship of the painter to the subject making it unique to the period it was painted in.

Immortalising a moment in an artefact, - presenting and celebrating the personal

The act of committing an image to canvas still imbues the subject with implied value, for various historic and material reasons.  
Making a painting of a person, direct from life; a unique artefact in a historically weighted medium, is effectively a way of showing you value the subject, as is exhibitingit

It is a human response (rather than electronic/photographic)


Contemporary relevance

Celebrity culture

Pushing the medium and my technique

Lecturing - the primary reason I want to do a PhD

Why do I want to do lecturing?

I enjoy :
talking about art,
discussing with artists their work and their motivations,
The practicalities of practice
helping artists find their direction
I have gained a taste for these things running an artist development space / studio and I would like to take it further

PhD factors - A list to be going on with

PHD
lecturing,
practice
research
portraiture
contemporary relevance
engagment
cultural and socio economic factors

PhDs What do I do to apply and what does PhD actually entail?

How do I write a research proposal? What should it contain? what do I actually want to do ? Can I shape a PhD to be what I want t do? What do I want to do? What are my interests, concerns and motivations in art and life for that matter?
Research or practice?

Drawings with paint for The Deep Space

My first set of canvas experiments for, I think I'm ready to start something ambitious

Probably the best place to buy canvas in London

Another new self portrait

Again I can't show you my workings out, but in my defence I did paint this without doing much except for sleep.
As you can see it is quite a lot bigger than the last one (just behind it)  1m x 1m, and it might just be the thrill of the new but I'm so happy with it I have already entered it for the BP portrait prize.

Finally a drawing and painting with paint- in oil

This is my new self portrait to test the latest development in my drawing with paint method, it is 16x20inches and was finished this Monday, so its still wet. I should really show the stages but it never occurs to me until afterwards, and if I ruined it, I think the photographs would haunt me.
If anyone is out there please do drop me a comment

Comparing galleries for MA Professional Practice module

Choosing galleries for this comparative study has been a real trial. The idea to take to galleries and compare them, is simple enough but to have 3000 words to say about the differences seems almost impossible. That they should be similar types of institutions both public or both private and of comparable scale seems initially counter intuitive but after consideration is actually fairly obvious; if the are similar the differences are less obvious and therefore have to be explained. Although actually the public / private distinction could actually be played with, say comparing a privately owned gallery with pretensions to philanthropy to a public gallery which now has to have commercial concerns in the modern world, for example the Saatchi gallery with the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

My eventual choice has been to choose two private galleries, of relatively medium scale not so big that they were amorphous multinational machines but not so small that if I blinked they might go to the wall in the current economic climate. One of the most significant factors in the choice was that as I would like to make some form of living from my art practice, while there might be more to be said about the very large galleries such as White Cube it would be personally advantageous to investigate the workings of galleries in which I could visualise my own work being shown in.