End of year reflection

I have grown so much in this last term. I have finally found where I want to be as an illustrator and can feel the start of my career forming! I know now that publishing and traditional illustration is where my practice belongs and I have done the research in order to be able to start my journey into the industry of children’s publishing,

This is the only term where I felt like my work in constellation has been able to combine with my subject practice. I was able to put more theory and symbolism into my visual work, backed by my academic research i’d undertaken in my dissertation writing. I always felt like my interest in Art History and illustration would always be separate things but now I know that they can combine really well and make each other stronger.

I was really inspired by something that Neal Fox said in yesterday’s Vertical studio. He quoted J.G Ballard “Be true to your obsessions, trust in them, follow them like a sleep walker.” This really resonated with me as for me this term I have gone back to my obsession with the Pre-Raphaelite painters and medieval art, and through following those interests, I think I have come out with a stronger project than I have ever done before. I was able to sustain myself throughout the whole term as the interest in what I was doing was so deep.

In terms of material practice, I also think I have improved leaps and bounds. I am more confident with working on a larger scale. My paintings have more texture and tonal variation. Before I was quite hesitant to go in with darker colour but this project has made me realise that more vivid jewel tones are far more striking than the muted lighter colours I gravitated to before.

I have also taken my work into 3D, I decided when I came home that I should take Layla and Jo’s suggestions and make a diorama from my work. I made large scale cardboard figures of my goblin characters and took them into the forest to pose them in nature, exactly how they appear in the story. Bringing my imagined worlds into reality was really interesting and an idea i’d like to continue with. It also served as a makeshift exhibition for me as the degree show ended up having to be moved online.

I also made a video which was new for me! Seeing my work as moving image was amazing and even just how much more you can get out of my pictures if you zoom in and focus on the details of the image to tell the story.

I am really going to miss university. Coping without the support of my peers and tutors in the last few weeks was really sad but I am proud of how I handled the stress of the situation and I think what I have achieved has been amazing considering the circumstances. I’m excited to see where the future takes me and determined to keep in touch with all the amazing people I’ve met at CSAD! I am truly thankful for my three years and have grown so much in my illustration practice and also as a person!

The Goblin Market: Visual Influences

Rossetti’s poem the Goblin Market explores themes of morality and religion. When thinking of images of heaven and hell, the artists that come to mind for me are Hieronymus Bosch and William Blake.

I went to the Garden of Earthly Delights for some visual inspiration when thinking about how to portray my goblins. This is a triptych full of strange creatures and has the atmosphere I was hoping to draw from for my own imagery. It is a painting also filled with images of fruit, which is used to represent earthly temptations. This is so similar to the way fruit is used within Rossetti’s poem to represent the temptation of pleasure.

This is a description of Bosch’s use of fruit found in a BBC Culture online article:

“Early descriptions of the triptych refer to it as the ‘strawberry painting’, and the fruit appears several times in the central panel. It allows Bosch to reference other forms of imagery: in one section, people pick apples from trees while a man offers a strawberry to a woman with a leering expression, a twist on biblical depictions of Eden. In another, couples feed each other berries, a scene traditionally associated with courtly romance, yet here they are doing more than merely flirting. According to one critic, Bosch ‘subverts and perverts’ the theme of courtly love, with “‘love fruit’, a traditional metaphor for amorous union, both religious and worldly, now transformed into a hellish prison”.

I also took inspiration from William Blake, my love for this artist really grew after visiting the exhibition during the trip to London last year. I really admire how dynamic his compositions were and wanted to use them as references for my own work. I also remember seeing a lot of Adam and Eve imagery in the exhibition, sexuality is present in a lot of his images, as well as the snake, to represent sin and temptation.

In this image ‘ The Temptation and the Fall of Eve’ we see the moment where Eve becomes the ‘fallen woman’, eating the fruit out of the mouth of the phallic looking snake who twists around her, a very sexually charged image.

I also referenced a picture from his book ‘Jerusalem’ called ‘Albion and his tormentors’ for the image of Lizzie fighting off the Goblins. Albion is actually being disembowelled by the women in the picture, which is very gruesome but I loved the composition and the dynamic poses. There’s a feeling of struggle and pain in the image that I wanted to borrow for my own narrative.

The Goblin Market pt. 2

Sexuality emerges within the poem as a reaction to the fruit. Christina Rossetti highlights female sexual desire in the poem, however this desire does not end in death for either of the sisters, unlike the narratives seen in the paintings of her contemporaries. By hiding these themes within a “children’s fable”, Rossetti is able to discuss female sexuality publicly. The poem represents an opposing view to the Pre-Raphaelite painters I have analysed, a radical viewpoint at the time.

There are parallels with the story of Adam and Eve, and the forbidden fruit. I decided to play with this visually, taking reference from biblical imagery.

I’ve depicted the sisters here, alongside a fruit tree, as Adam and eve are traditionally shown. The pomegranates on the branches make reference to Persephone, the Greek goddess of the underworld, creating visual links to sin and punishment. The snake that twists around the tree trunk is pink, deliberately phallic. The flowers that grow at their feet are also coriander flowers, a plant that is said to represent “guilty feelings of lust.”

Women in the poem are shown to have sexual agency, Laura’s desire manifests of its own accord, shown as a natural response in her coming of age. She decides to give in to the temptation of the fruit by herself and does not express any remorse for eating the fruit, instead she just desires more.

Laura could therefore be viewed as our ‘fallen woman’, in Rossetti’s narrative, this leads to her becoming sick with desire, coming close to death. She is saved however by her sister Lizzie, the self-sacrificing martyr figure. This echoes Rossetti’s own experiences in life, of the penitentiary and seeing these ‘fallen women’ become redeemed. Unlike her Pre-Raphaelite counterparts, Rossetti sees female sexuality as something natural, a ‘sin’ not deserving of death.

The goblins could be seen to represent men and the allure of marriage, the trap that robbed women of their freedoms in Victorian times. Rossetti chose never to marry, instead choosing to find companionship in her sister in law, Elizabeth Siddall. We see sisterhood as a strong theme within the poem, the sisterly bond is seen as a way out of patriarchal oppression.

I’ve used floral symbolism again here with the daffodils. They are a flower for sisterly love, symbolising fondness, faith, forgiveness and forthrightness.

The Goblin Market pt.1

Last term I chose to explore narrative work made for children. I made a draft of a children’s book based on Greek Mythology and also took my narratives into ceramics. I feel like this project helped me get a better grasp on how to tell stories, how to pace a story and how to lay out pages. I drew mainly in pencil as I was drafting out a dummy book for the majority of the term. This was definitely more of a technical project for me and involved a lot of working things out and focusing on mainly getting a narrative across.

This term I felt like it was important for me to come away from that slightly and go back to painting, which is something I really missed. I love creating finished illustrations and the texture and finish of painted artwork. I also felt that I wanted to put much more thought into the meaning of what I was making. Theory is something that perhaps I’ve neglected in the past when making work. I chose to focus on how I was getting the story across and less about what the story actually meant and any visual symbolism I could include.

The dissertation I wrote for constellation was about Pre-Raphaelite artwork and how women were portrayed within those paintings often as sick or dying. Their deaths were often heavily sexualised or romanticised. When writing this essay I also discovered that a common narrative in these Pre-Raphaelite pictures was the ‘fallen woman’, a woman who had decided to explore her sexuality would often end up dead. In narratives like the ‘Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Ophelia’, taken from Tennyson and Shakespeare, young women who succumb to sexual temptation or find themselves rejected by a man, end up dying or taking their own lives.

Here are some excerpts from my dissertation:

“We can speculate that Ophelia may have been a character popular with this group of paintings as she reaffirmed ideas of male power and female dependency. We see a woman driven to sacrifice her life for a man, rather than exist without a husband. By painting these narratives, the Pre-Raphaelites are endorsing the commonplace Victorian belief that a woman should strive for marriage, or else have no future to look forward to. The images are a cold reflection of a society in which women had no financial or social independence, doomed to a life of domesticity and marriage, or else they were to have no life at all. ”

“She is depicted caught in an act of ‘moral disobedience’, neglecting her spiritual work at the loom to instead pursue worldly pleasures. She represents the ‘Fallen Woman’ a recurring trope in Pre-Raphaelite art. This is a woman who has had sexual relations out of wedlock and therefore is deemed unmarriageable by society. Hunt’s work often contained moral stories that revealed the consequences of succumbing to the temptation of sex; such as The Hireling Shepard (1851) and The Awakening Conscience (1853). His collection of work added to a discourse surrounding female sexuality. The sexual desires of women were something to be feared as they threatened the structure of society and the careful balance of the home. “The fallen woman had a double and powerful hold on the mid-Victorian imagination, simultaneously repellent and exciting, engendering both pity and loathing.” (Bullen, 1998 pp. 58)”

As I was looking to include more meaning and symbolism in my illustrations, I felt like this was a topic I could take into my illustrations. I wanted to illustrate a narrative where female sexuality was not seen as such an immoral thing, where female bodies were not sexualised and death was not the natural ending.

I ended my dissertation by talking about the female artists within the Pre-Raphaelite movement and how their work should be taken more seriously by art historians. Female authored work provides a different, and often more progressive, view on femininity. Because of this, I decided it would be best to go to a female member of the movement for inspiration to feed my project. I instantly thought of Christina Rossetti, she was the sister of one of the central figures of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and is a respected poet in her own right.

Her poem the Goblin Market, is a narrative about two sister who encounter a group of goblins in the woods. The goblins aim to tempt the sisters into buying and tasting some of their deadly fruits. Laura succumbs to temptation and falls ill, but is eventually saved by her sister Lizzie, in a selfless act of love.

Christina Rossetti wrote the Goblin Market whilst volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene penitentiary for ‘fallen women’, which was a reform and rehabilitation centre for prostitutes. Arguably, this experience would’ve given her first hand experience with the ‘fallen women’ shunned by Victorian society and gave her the belief that women who had transgressed sexuality could be redeemed.

The British Library’s Introduction to the Goblin Market says ‘ Its fairytale cadences led the Spectator to declare it ‘a true children’s poem’, yet the paper also noted that its adult themes of temptation, transgression and redemption also appealed to a mature readership. The poem was greeted with rapturous applause when the publisher Alexander Macmillan read a manuscript version out loud to a working men’s society in Cambridge. Rossetti herself was not writing for children during this period, emphatically declining to contribute to a children’s book on the grounds that ‘children are not among my suggestive subjects.’ This struck a chord with me as I feel the same way about my illustrations, they may look childlike in appearance as I am inspired by traditional children’s illustration,  but I desire my work to explore deeper themes. My intended audience for this project would therefore be the same as Rossetti’s; children may be interested in my imagery but it has the appeal and intellectual backing that could also make my work suitable to a lot of adults.

 

Creative Writing workshop!

I took part in a workshop organised by Amelia and one of the creative writing tutors. I got the chance to be paired up with a creative writing student so I could make some work in response to their writing and they could do the same in response to my illustrations! I thought it was a really lovely idea and I was nervous but excited to take part.

I was paired with Meriem Jouti who is an amazing poet from Morocco! She read me her poem called ‘Buried at Birth’ which explores femininity and the cultural differences in how women are treated in Morocco vs the UK. The title ‘Buried at Birth’ comes from the fact that girls were seen as undesirable and babies were often buried at birth as the parents would’ve preferred to have a baby boy.

I really resonated with Meriem’s writing as my own work explores themes of femininity and female worth in society as well as sexuality which is something that her poem touched on.

Lydia also joined us and made some responses of her own! It was really nice to work with her a second time in a workshop, I always enjoy seeing what she comes up with!

This is Meriem’s poem:

Buried at birth  

They put her on a scale  

Then bring her virtue and put it on the other end  

It was all she was worth  

See, if it were back in the days  

They would have buried her at birth  

Because a girl carries her father’s name on a tray  

As the world watches if she’ll go astray   

She has to walk, glide on a perfect straight line  

She can’t slouch or sway too much  

Every move and every step has to be refined  

Because she’s her father’s eyes, his pride 

Unless she trips, stumbles or falls  

And drops her father’s name on the floor  

Covered in shame  

His own blood now synonym to dirt 

Her virtue is gone  

And with it all her worth  

See that’s why  

they buried the likes of her at birth 

 

But they have the audacity to say  

That society has changed 

Evolved  

And all those backwards thoughts  

Erased, eradicated  

But I ask where?  

And according to who?  

Because where I come from  

I still answer to my virtue  

To my modesty  

My mother once told me  

That laughing too loud in the streets  

Gave people the wrong idea about me 

That I had to be careful  

Try not to be too playful  

Because at birth 

I was buried under a well crafted tray  

That carried my father’s name  

And as long as I walk that straight line  

Untouched and pure  

My father’s name tight and secure  

He could hold his head up high  

And tell everyone I was his angel, his eyes, 

I was his pride  

But if I stumble  

So does my family  

And my father’s precious name 

Everything I do and say  

carries so much weight  

if I do or say the wrong things  

they wouldn’t hesitate  

to clip my wings 

see god says he’ll forgive me  

embrace me even if I have sinned 

but society can never  

accept me, grant me any esteem  

if my dignity is binned  

they will watch me fall and sink  

with my father’s name  

it’ll leave their lips coated with so much shame  

Gossip and rumours will strip my worth 

that is why they buried the likes of me at birth 

 

 

 

My cousin she says  

Girls like her and I  

Are like flowers  

See a flower  

Is so pretty, so sweet, so flowery  

It makes you stop and gaze  

It has to be watered every day  

Sheltered and protected  

From filthy wandering hands 

That want to uproot it  

Ruin it  

And if a flower is ruined  

It is doomed  

Gone is the beauty that once bloomed  

Because if a flower is crumbled and crushed  

She says as she takes a flower and crushes it in front of me 

“It will never go back to how it used to be” 

All that is left are the wrinkles  

And holes where innocence used to be 

My cousin says we’re like flowers 

Beautiful and always admired  

but we have the ability  

to bring so much shame and mortification  

to our families  

no one cares about our education  

dreams or careers  

if we are touched or creased  

if our modesty, if our virtue disappears 

our value ceases to be   

we are flowers, my cousin says  

and flowers is all we will ever be.  

 

It is so easy to say  

it’s all just a third world country’s ideology  

Confuse religion with tradition  

And blame it all on that conservative backwards mentality  

That allows the continuity of long overrun patriarchy 

Girls here are empowered they say 

Encouraged to speak their minds  

Dance and move around as they please  

No one is watching them in the streets  

They carry their own name  

Their virtue has so value here  

It is discarded at the earliest opportunity  

They call it experience  

Fun and games, and who cares about virginity  

Modesty has no currency here  

Skin is shed and showcased  

Like flowers, anyone can gaze  

But they have laws in place  

To keep wandering hands at bay  

But I hear the word slut  

Roll off tongues much quicker  

Harsher, just as loud and judgemental  

As anywhere else in the world 

Uttered with the same prejudice  

Whore is mouthed with the same emphasis  

Carries the same ignominy  

A crumbled crushed flower  

Is crushed in all cultures  

Elle l’a bien cherche   

Jabtha f Rasha  

she was asking for it  

in all languages  

They will put her virtue on a scale  

And put on her on the other end  

Because it is all she is worth  

See back in the days,  

They used to bury the likes of her at birth.  

 

These were my visual responses:

I loved working with Meriem, she was so talented! We swapped details so we can stay in touch and perhaps collaborate in the future.

O’Hara Sisters ‘Not Meet-Up’

I noticed that Natalia and Lauren O’Hara had advertised a little ‘not meet-up’ that was going to happen over Zoom on their Instagram. I emailed and asked if I could attend and submitted a question for their Q&A. I wanted to ask if anyone had any advice for third year illustration students graduating in the time of covid-19.

There were some really amazing people who attended the zoom call including Coralie Bickford-Smith, Sabina Radeva and Andrea Macdonald from Penguin.

I took a lot of notes and recorded the answer to my question. I found everyone to be very knowledgeable about children’s publishing and the call was really beneficial in helping grow my knowledge of professional practice. I also made a friend from the call which was nice!!

Worcester Symposium

Attending the Worcester Symposium was a new experience for me! I loved being in a room full of interesting people all united by a common interest in folklore! Listening to the talks filled my head with images so I made a lot of visual notes as well as writing things down that I thought could inspire my own practice.

I found almost every speaker to be relevant to me. The first keynote was all about how enchantment exists and can be created. Which fits in with my work as I am all about enchanting people through my imagery.

I really enjoyed listening to Clive Hicks Jenkins talk about his project he did with English Heritage as well as a talk about the various different illustrative portrayals of the story of little red riding hood. It was so amazing to hear illustrations picked apart in an academic paper and analysed.

I also really enjoyed the conversations I had on the day. I ended up talking to a lady sat next to me as she was also from Kidderminster! A perk of being so close to home is that I could talk to local creatives who are from the same area as me originally. She ended up telling me that she had been studying the folklore history of Kidderminster, which I was surprised to discover was actually very interesting. She told me that our town had it’s own white witch, as well as letting me know about Sabrina, the goddess of the River Severn.

Escapism Exhibition: Collaborating with Lydia

A group of us decided to get together and organise an external exhibition. We managed to convince Arcade Campfa to let us show in their space in town for two weeks and together we decided on the theme of Escapism for our show!

Me and Lydia both thought it would be a fun and new experience to collaborate as we both wanted to create something new and had similar ideas when it came to interpreting the theme of Escapism. We both thought of fairy tales and how these stories provided Escapism for people when reading them. I showed Lydia the story The Wild Swans written by Hans Christian Anderson, it was a story I had illustrated previously and thought it would be fun to revisit as a collaboration this time.

Working with Lydia was a great experience as not only was it fun, it was great to be able to bounce ideas off of each other and she helped me see things from an entirely new perspective. She would think of ideas that I would never have thought of myself and vice versa and I think this helped us both take our work into new territory.

It terms of the practical making this has influenced me a lot too. We originally thought that we would end up creating quite small illustrations as this is how we both usually worked. However we realised quickly that making huge A1 pieces was the way to go. Working large scale meant that we could both add to the same illustration at the same time and meant our outcomes would be far more spontaneous and playful. Lydia also introduced me to working straight in ink, this is something I wasn’t as confident in doing before but through this project I’ve really come to love drawing straight in ink with a brush and have borrowed this technique from her way of working. We also both discovered collage! These are two things i’m hoping to continue using in future illustrations.

Opening night was amazing and it was really interesting to speak with people who came about my work! Everyone had a great time and I was so proud of us for coming together and seeing what we had achieved.

Penguin Student Design Awards

I decided as part of my professional practice component it would be good to enter some competitions. The Penguin Student Design Awards seemed like it would be a good fit for me. I entered it last year as part of the course but I wasn’t overly satisfied with my entry. It was done with a more graphic design approach at a time where I didn’t really know who I was as an illustrator. Penguin is a publisher who I would really love to work for in the future, especially in their children’s literature department. I read a lot of books published by Penguin as a child and they have published the work of illustrators I really admire such as Quentin Blake and Beatrix Potter.

This year’s book was Goodnight Mister Tom, I felt this was far more suited to me as an illustrator than last year’s title Wonder as it was a period piece. I love illustrating stories set in the past as opposed to modern day as I feel like the illustrations end up being much more visually interesting. The story was really sweet and I connected with it.

I went through a few different ideas before I ended up settling on the final cover design. Last year I got quite conceptual with my idea but looking at the winning entries I realised that simple is sometimes best. I decided not to overthink it and just paint a simple portrayal of the two main characters as the story is really just about their relationship. Mister Tom is described as very tall and broad shouldered so I made him tower over Willie, however I also used rounder shapes to soften him and give him a gentler appearance.

I wrote the text with my left hand to make it look as if it was written by a child. There is a lovely scene in the book where Tom teaches Willie how to read and write.

Professional Practice: Teaching

I’m getting closer and closer to graduation and it’s definitely made me think about how I’m going to make a living once I graduate. Unfortunately, I am aware that my dream career as a freelance illustrator tends to take a few years before it can be something that is reliable financially. I really want to stay in Cardiff after I graduate and continue working on my illustrations, but this means I will need to get a part time job in order to pay my bills. I really would love to keep my day job creative and ideally something just as enjoyable as illustration work. My first thought was becoming an art teacher, I did some research into the profession and applied for some PGCE courses both in Cardiff and at home.

I knew for one of my interviews that I would have to teach a class of Year 8 students, so I got together with Chloe, who was also interested in teaching, and we collaborated together to make a lesson plan. We decided it would be good practice for the both of us to get some students together and test drive our lesson to see how it would work. I came up with the idea for our workshop activity inspired by my own illustration practice, and how I like to draw from the past for inspiration. I decided to make a workshop about how you can reinterpret a painting from the past and put your own spin on it to make it more contemporary. I chose to look at Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian as it has been reinterpreted in the past by the Abstract Expressionist Frank Auerbach. I really like his version as when you first look at it, it seems like a frenzied mess. However, after closer inspection you can see how he has carefully reinterpreted elements of the painting into abstraction.

Bacchus and Ariadne 1971 Frank Auerbach born 1931 Presented by the executors of the estate of David Wilkie 1993 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T06687

The first activity was to look at the painting by Titian and to copy it, but you were not allowed to look down at your own paper as you were drawing. Then we gave out more pieces of paper and got everyone to choose a section of the painting to reinterpret. At the end we pieced all the drawings together on the floor like a jigsaw puzzle.

I really enjoyed putting on the workshop and I felt like everyone who came had a really nice time. I would love to do more workshops in the future, especially for older students or adults.

Unfortunately, my experience teaching younger children and my interview for the PGCE did not go as well. I found it hard to get the children to listen to me and I think my workshop was a bit to conceptual to suit the younger audience. I was rejected later on in the day by the school as they felt I did not have strong enough knowledge of the national curriculum and I was not confident enough to be able to deal with a rowdy class of children.  I found the rejection really hard to process and it upset me but looking back now a week later I feel like everything happens for a reason. I’m thankful for the experience and proud of myself for having the confidence to teach and put myself out there. I now realise that teaching is much more demanding than I really considered. It is something that may not be suitable for me because I am a quiet person who finds being the centre of attention very draining. I think long days teaching in a school would use up all my energy and I would not have the time to really work on my illustration practice and get where I need to be.

Now I have decided against teaching as a career option, I want to explore the other options that would be more suited to my personality. Today I met up with Angie Dutton to talk about my options in terms of volunteering in the arts in Cardiff. I have made a list of all of her suggestions for me and I am planning to do some research and reach out to some of them to see if I could get some work experience.

I have already reached out to a lady at Hijinx Theatre as they are currently looking for somebody to help them out with Marketing at their office. I would love to do this as I helped out Kitty last term making some sets and props for one of their productions and really loved it. She told us that the people at Hijinx were the loveliest people that she’s ever worked with. Doing something that has a positive impact on the world is really important to me and I feel like working for a company that gives such a lovely experience to disabled people would be so rewarding.

I’m excited to see where this career component will take me, I have no clue where I’m going but i’m hoping that will be something I will figure out along the way. I know rejection is all part of getting where you need to be so I’m going to try and not let the fear stop me from reaching out and putting myself out into the world!