Tuesday 24 February 2015

Transmission: Felicity Allen, 'Begin Again - Creating a dis-oeuvre' (14/10/14)


I found her work to be interesting in its origin, as opposed to its manifestation. She admits that her paintings are poor and I have to agree, they are not lacking in character or life but in simple aesthetics; the reason for this being that she had not painted in years. Her work ‘Begin Again’ was created after finishing a position she had held for a long time at a certain gallery (which name escapes me) she decided to pick up her brush once again in an attempt to fall back in love with painting.


In the lecture she said that, “self doubt is common place in the making of art” and although I find this to be very true for me at present, I was greatly hoping that that would disappear with time. However, throughout my first term of University I have only been presented with a handful of artists that ooze self assurance, though on reflection I believe this to be entirely false. Creating art is a difficult and challenging business and when one does not question their process, technique, purpose etc. how can they really create something artful at all? Without the presence of doubt how can someone discover the truth? It is frustrating to only present questions with no straightforward answer, but isn’t that what art is all about?

She spoke a lot about things that inspire her, for example, ‘Three Guineas’ by Virginia Woolf and ‘The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley’ by Robert Kudielka. Her points of interest in the lecture bled together at times, jumping from “denarritarisation” to “Picasso is so sexy” to how “females represent nature and males represent culture”! Overall I felt that when she answered questions at the end of the lecture she was far easier to listen to.

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