Frank Rafter's Blog: the path of shame

note the lack of capitals - I am not really sure why my attendance to my faithful readers has been so sporadic but I can only claim lack of time - the old excuse.... but this time there is some substance to it . There has been a lot of outside activity in my life over the past six months and that won't change for the rest of this year(academic) so I can only plod forward.

I will give one piece of good news to begin and that is that my creative thinking and consequent work in the studio and workshop is in the best state it has been for the whole of this year so far. After a lot of thrashing around (metaphorically and physically) I have found something that I wish to pursue deeply,widely and perhaps contradictorily, narrowly, and that is - skin.
I will later talk a little more about how I intend to investigate this but first I will do a quick recap over the past few weeks.
Revive (Y3 Print Show) opened and ran very successfully for a week at the Sailors Home and all the work can be seen on Third Year Print Buddies Facebook page - photos beautifully taken by Dervla Mulcahy - and now some of the prints from the show can be seen in the corridor outside Y4 PCP studio (on the way to the canteen - LSAD)
One of the surprising results of the show for me was the main work I put up; when I came here first I would have been quite dismissive of digital print work but all that has changed because I have found out how much effort may be needed to produce the pieces involved.

Edge 1 digital print 50 x 157 cm

Edge 4 digital print 40 x 57 cm

The other thing I got from the show has been a very positive boost in both the creative and the theoretical areas of work with skin becoming the topic of my Third Year Project:

This photo of my heel has produced a wide variety of images already and apart from the obvious, aquatints are appearing and there will be photo etches - if not of this part of my body then some other:

thee will lead into and be combined with landscapes seascapes and sand patterns because after all the land and the sea is the skin of the earth and sand -the seashore is the edge that joins the two sections of skin together.

So like the surface of my skin

But there is an artist to whom I must draw attention here as was my attention drawn to her by my indefatigable tutors - in this case Noelle:

Vija Celmins (b.1938, Riga) Ocean - lithograph

This artists' work appeals so much because of its apparent simplicity but also because of its endlessness ands not least because of that feeling of its being a portrait of the skin of the ocean which conceals so much more that it reveals .... one of he great qualities of skin.

Celmins' work reminds also of another artist whose work inspires me -Norman Ackroyd (already mentioned above): the subject matter of both artists deals with the edge and the endlessness of the sea where it takes over from the fussiness of the land.