Thursday 1 September 2011

Three days hard work

Having worked so hard for the Visual Inquiry assessment on Monday, exhaustion hit me Tuesday.  In the morning I was so tired, I was only capable of sitting at the table doing cutting and sticking.  I had collected all the materials for my Concept Board for Pattern & Meaning over the last couple of weeks, and just had to cut the images to size, arrange them and stick them to the A2 paper.  Jim had collected lots of DIY paint samples, so I arranged some colour swatches, as well as the images of various plants that I had photographed in Kings Park, and some magazine pullouts.  I was quite pleased with the finished concept board. 

In the afternoon I went to college and found myself a quiet spot in the library.  I had brought my Historical Issues folder, and went through all the material to date, making notes on what I thought was likely to come up in the assessment.  At 5pm, I trolled off to the lecture.  The tutor presented a short lecture (and omitted to cover all the material because he had not realised the notes went onto the second page of lecture notes).  Then we were told to space ourselves out in the lecture theatre, one empty seat either side of each person, and it was a closed book test.  I was really relieved I had revised because several of my anticipated questions came up.  There was only one artwork displayed where I did not know the artist - Durer - which is annoying as I had included a quote from him in my Pattern & Meaning visual diary.

"Nature holds the beautiful for the artist who has the insight to extract it.  ... Depart not from nature according to your fancy, imagining to find aught better by yourself, ... For veryily, "art" is embedded in nature; he who can extract it, has it"  Durer

I'm hoping to get a pretty good result for the  test next week.

I still felt exhausted on Wednesday when I went to my Public Lives, Private Issues lecture.  I had done all the reading (unlike last week when I was locked out of the university computer).  I was prepared to speak to the tutors and say I was struggling and needed some assistance to get my essay question set up.  My plan was to do the essay early during tuition-free week, but that I was not going to put in a lot of time as I thought I could only scrape a pass.  But when the tutors reviewed last week's work, it turns out I was the only one to make a key point in the Critical Summaries.  So I can draw salient conclusions at the end of each class.  But I struggle with the analytical thinking required in the essays.  I still think I'm going to only scrape a pass in the essay, but maybe I can increase my final result with my class contribution mark. 

Today, it was my favourite Pattern & Meaning class.  We are now running up to the last mid-semester assessment, next Thursday.  I have most of the work ready, but I just want to do some multi-colour samples.  I talked through my ideas with Kelsey, and spent class (and extra time) making up the designs for two further silkscreens.  I booked out 2 more screens, cleaned and emulsed them.  I have one screen already with the outlines on it.  Two more screens will give overlaid colours to create fairly 3D images.  It would have been nice to get the outline screen made up to colour the background area, but  there is a limit to how much preparation I can do, prior to getting the prints made up before Thursday's class.  In my mind's eye, I can see wonderful samples.  But at least one needs to be 1m x 1m. And I still need to get the fabric.  Probably on Saturday, in Perth.

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