Artist talk
LEVEL FIVE - PROJECT ONE
Professional Practice with David Hancock
I really enjoyed Davids talk about his work through his career. I found it relateable to my own work in some instances. My favourite part was when he explained how he would take inspiration from the stories portrayed in Pre Ralphalite paintings by creating similar displays in his work but with a 21st century twist. For example he would study a story behind a Pre Raphelite painting and represent the features that define the story in a mordern day setting. This theme interested me the most out of all Davids themes throughout the years because i have always said i wanted to create large scale artworks like the ones from the Pre Raphelite but im still undecided on how how id relate my theme of reaction erotica to portray similar scenes. Using a story however, and relating aspects of this story into the painting is something to think about.
David first created large scale paintings often around 8ft tall. These would take him around 3 months to paint. This put my mind at ease because i know i want to work bigger than anything ive orginally painted but was scared at how long this would take as a painting A0 sized would take around 3 weeks maybe longer for me. He also explained at how he wanted to take up watercolour painiting and so developed his work using watercolour rather than acrylic. This was due to him being able to cut his painting time down as he wouldnt be painting the same thing a number of times as with watercolour you dont need to layer the paint like you do acrlyic. The technique ive been using in my paintings has me layering and layering different colours ontop of eachother. I feel like if i pushed myself to experiment with water colour rather than acrylic all the time i could have more work to show. I found it itneresting David chose to change from working with photographs of scenes in peoples bedrooms to live paintings of dolls set up. I feel like this change could be a struggle to adjust to but its something id want to look into.
David also spoke to us about life after graducation and how it is hard to keep yourself in the artworld and make money from it. David discussed working with public galleries and commerisal galleries and how different his work was he made for either. He discussed how helping galleries also gets you in the door with the curator and oppertunities in the gallery.
I found Davids talk to be useful for planning the Gallery exhibition for Proffessional Context One. David discussed how he reached out to all different types of people through how he held his exhibitions. For example he left out plasterscene for children to interact and made sculptures from. Using his own work as their inspiration around them.