Onochord proposal

As mentioned in my last post, the Onochord proposal is a project I'm seeking funding for, and there's a competition being run by Visit Oslo to win a trip to Oslo, with front row tickets to see A-ha perform at the Nobel Peace Prize giving ceremony coming up in December.

This would be an ideal opportunity to not only see A-ha, which is an opportunity I'll never turn down(!) but Magne exhibited work at the Nobel Peace Centre before, and it might give me the chance to find a way for the Onochord project to happen!

It involves uploading a selfie to Instagram. I don't normally do selfies, or Instagram - I've never fathomed the purpose of it unless you're a complete narcissist - which I'm not!! 

Wish me luck!! 

I am not Ai Wei Wei

I'd like to take a break to explain why I stopped producing fine art work.

When I was at University, not only did I have less of a student loan than many students now, but I also received a regular small grant to cover materials costs and the expenses of producing work.

Since I graduated, I've applied every now and then for funding and not been successful.
Not wanting to allow a lack of funding to prevent me from creating work, I carried on regardless, but the disparity between the concept I had in mind for the work and the available non-existent budget, meant that I was producing far lower quality work than I would really prefer.

I thought about this this morning as I cleaned the kitchen.
Some artists have incorporated cleaning as a work of art itself.
Other artists have second jobs that have informed their practice in some way or another - they've somehow used knowledge or skills from those jobs or materials as part of the jobs to produce work. 

But I still think that compromises their work!
After all, Van Gogh never worked in the cafe in Arles other than to paint it.
He didn't get a job as a barista to pay the rent and buy canvases; that isn't realistic.

Anyway, I had a concept for a project last year - the Onochord Bicycle Bell project. It was run initially as a test cycle ride back in 2014, but I had hoped to run it as a larger cycling art project.

Realistically, this is a social art project. However, it was included as part of a larger funding application - can you guess what happened to this??

Instead, the Jason Bradbury illustration, which has been supported by workshops, was successfully exhibited at the Engine Shed last Thursday as part of Future Fest.
At the event, Jason came over and had a look at the work, said we'd get a photo with it when he's in his Back To The Future gear, and later on we found some time to do that. 
Jason really liked the illustration, and it received a lot of positive feedback from visitors.
I also took the opportunity to have a look around at the various technology at Future Fest - there was the Oculus Rift again, and when I tested it out, they had zombies. 
Lincoln Tech Hub were doing 3D scanning, and there was @lindastrands the robot, taking pics of people and tweeting them.

I am prevented from being able to produce a lot of work because the funding would've allowed me to purchase a new imac - my current old mac has obsolete software and will no longer update, so its use is limited.
The guys at Lincoln Tech Hub will tell you that 3D printing has a cost, so it's not as if you can come up with an idea and just 3D print it (although that's supposed to be what engineers do).
I did think of making a Back To The Future Jason Bradbury in his DeLorean comic figurine - of the kind that is often marketed at comic cons, and having a few 3D printed to sell, but would still require a production budget.
Oh, and btw, the IP for that is mine.

I've been thinking about this, and thinking about the Onochord project, as the
Nobel Peace Prize was announced, and I'm preparing another trip to Oslo in April. 
I'm really hoping to be able to make this a work-related trip - I've made a suggestion for that.... a discussion to include some of my older work perhaps, but I came up with an even better idea.

If Lincoln won't allow me to produce the Onochord project, then I'm taking it somewhere where I hope it will be appreciated! 

There is a part of me that doesn't want to let them win. 
The naysayers. Those that know that if they ignore my work, don't bother to fund it (knowing that they could), I won't be able to produce it, and that suits them fine, because they'd prefer it if I just curl up and die so that students can get the opportunities for free.... or something.

Is that what they want? To destroy my career? By not funding my proposals?

I do wish I could have a career in the arts still. 
I feel that my potential has been wasted, neglected, and I don't wish to give any more to those financial abusers, the tax credits cutting vendetta.

If I was Ai Wei Wei, I could announce that Company X had refused me materials and offers of said materials would come in, but I'm not Ai Wei Wei.

I've also had to take a break due to my eldest son's diagnosis with depression.
Becoming an unpaid carer was not the career I had in mind at all.

Teenagers these days are obsessed with YouTube and Minecraft.
"You should do Minecraft!" they say. In the words of a villager

I made a Minecraft skin then created this.

I've set up a Youtube channel. I don't know what I'll do with it yet.
I don't think I can compete with the 'rockstar' status of gamers such as PewDiePie or Markiplier, but at some stage I'm considering a number of options.
I used to upload animation work, but I don't know if I have the time or resources to create animations any more. Another is to upload expertise and tutorials, but I don't know why audiences don't just go to University like I did? 
Currently I'm thinking of relaunching my graphic novel Kickstarter, but either way, I still require a new iMac and funding to produce new work, whatever that may be. And I'm not Ai Wei Wei.

Dismaland

Since the digital workshops, I've been running several after schools comics workshops whilst finishing the Ayscoughfee proposal.

The Ayscoughfee proposal was finished and sent, however, the response has been negative. This is why I haven't done any fine art work for a while.

Sometimes people that have studied fine art attempt to make me laugh by suggesting my work is fine art, when I haven't produced any fine art work for over a year now, and all my proposals keep getting rejected. 

The LAN has been invited to create murals for the Rainforest Ward at Lincoln County Hospital. At this stage, it might be tempting to include this project in this blog as a fine art commission, although I'm not sure. Especially as I've largely been sketching characters from 1980s anime cartoon Mysterious Cities Of Gold, and as such am appropriating imagery.

LAN/Onlincolnshire fully funded workshops

I've been very busy organising the LAN/Onlincolnshire workshops as part of a Knowledge Transfer Partnership at the UoL - hence the Digital Conference.

Today was the last of these, for which I delivered my expertise as an illustrator about graphic novels and self-publishing

A very interesting article today, whilst uploading info, on Mark Leckey - interesting use of 3D printing half of his own body.

The Ayscoughfee proposal has been budgeted and finished to be looked into over Easter, and after the holidays, I'll finally get the chance to go into the Technology Hub and work out ideas. The trouble is that Malcolm has his own theories about some laser cut bird silhouettes to sell in the museum, and in my head I'm thinking more along the lines of Mark Leckey's experimental work, and am more inclined to develop bird characters based on the original collection, similar to the Birdman concept dolls, or something else, but I feel as though I've been discussing this for ages, and just want to actually get on with things and start working properly on this.

All information about the work I've been doing for the LAN is in the blog, with a link to my Illustration blog, so I've been busy!

It's been great to run these at The Collection in the gallery, as part of the current Viewpoints exhibition and discussion, with our live tweeting and contributions included in the LAN blog here.

Lincolnshire Digital Conference 2015

This week I've been budgeting the Ayscoughfee proposal for support from Onlincolnshire, organising some workshops for the LAN, and I was invited to attend the Lincolnshire Digital Conference 2015 at The Showroom.

As I'm due to make use of 3D printing technology for my work with Ayscoughfee at some point, it was good to see the latest uses for reproducing the head of a Terracotta Army figure.

Guest speaker Jason Bradbury also attended, with a slightly different talk to the one he presented at last years' alumni event, mainly that he first appeared on a screen mounted on a remote control robotic device, and presented most of his talk on a segway/hoverboard.

He's working on a DeLorean for the upcoming anniversary of Back To The Future this coming October.

Images in the LAN blog here

went to ask a question, accidentally did a selfie

Flock Of Birds

I've recently upgraded my phone to an iphone, so I'm testing its capacity for photos and other recordings, however, it lacks storage, so I'm also testing out the use of cloud storage to be able to upload images and store large amounts of data, along with Google + (which I've never found necessary before).

This is for the potential to create stop-motion animations with the iphone, to see if it's possible. 

Here's a test photo of a bench in Nettleham, just outside of Lincoln.

bench at Nettleham

So far having difficulty attempting to update this blog on my iphone, but have found my iphone photos on my mac and have been more successful updating that way.
Videos and animation will take up a lot more memory, so I will need some way to store and upload the data. I can always use my old camera, but I was hoping this way might be more efficient, and I can work more remotely.

Listening to a lot of bird songs lately....

I've been tweeting new articles about about arts funding, and I thought that some could be linked in here for the purposes of professional practice and reference.

Fix The Pipeline For STEAM Talent In The Creative Economy

Paying Artists

Failed Scientist - for my previous work with Apparatjik, and as I consider ideas for Ayscoughfee based around ornithology and taxidermy, and with my current graphic novel being illustrated as a creative experiment in Cloudbusting, Lincoln is the STEAMpunk capital of Europe.

Since Sliced Bread exhibition at Ayscoughfee Hall

This week I visited Spalding and Ayscoughfee Hall to see how Fi Burke had responded to the space with her current exhibition "Since Sliced Bread".
I read this review, and after my disgust at the description "mere illustration" - as a joint honours graduate, I would never ever describe illustration as "mere" or less than any other creative discipline - I went to see the exhibition myself.

Fi isn't from Lincolnshire, so she had to spend a lot of time visiting many of the locations of windmills that are a familiar part of my own heritage, and researching things that for me, would be fairly straightforward.

For instance, the Windmill Field, is similar to a concept I had in mind for a proposal I wrote that wasn't successful. 
The windmills are exhibited in a similar fashion to memorial fields, trapped in a windless brick undercroft as a memorial to the millers and farmers, including my Grandad, who had a small family farm. More information here.

Fi Burke - Windmill Field 2014

There is a war memorial in Ayscoughfee, but invariably many names of people like my Grandad, who never fought and died in the war, nor my Grandma, who never fought and died in the war, are never remembered. 

Community Garden of Wisdom

Growing up in South Holland meant that adults would often disappear down the greenhouse, and sometimes would give you tasks to do, such as setting seeds, or filling plant pots with compost. Dad would always mark his plants on white plastic markers with a chinagraph pencil. He worked in a nursery growing houseplants, and his sudden death felt much as though he'd disappeared out of one of those vast greenhouses and left us behind. The Pavilion of The Limpid Solitude.

Here Fi has invited workshop participants to share food and mill-related sayings to create a community garden of wisdom.

Fi Burke - We Are What We Eat

 In the room behind the kitchen at Ayscoughfee, Fi made use of the pantry, filled with jars containing text from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence.
In that rejected proposal, I wanted to paint portraits of contemporary Lincolnshire folk on plates, possibly in the style of Van Gogh, to reference the Dutch history of South Holland.

Fi Burke - We Are What We Eat

Fi Burke - Flours

After chatting to Fi and curator Rachel about a possible meeting in November, I went around the gardens to take some photos of the aviary. 

It had never really occurred to me how lucky we were to have the aviary at Ayscoughfee, until I moved to Lincoln - I guess I thought every park had one, so I took the opportunity to photograph the birds and take some sound recordings of their bird calls for reference. The large aviary at Ayscoughfee is filled with budgerigars, cockatiels, lovebirds, and a variety of exotic bird species that I always secretly wanted to let fly free. I'm not a huge fan of caged birds. This is also something worth exploring.

Love birds at Ayscoughfee

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There used to be a large peacock aviary across the garden opposite, but peacocks no longer reside at Ayscoughfee, and that aviary that stood empty for a while is no longer there. I started to imagine 3D printing peacock statues in honour of the former residents.

A bench in Ayscoughfee Gardens