16/02/2018 - FINAL TIGERS AND ASSESSMENT CONCLUSION

I was so pleased to leave the house after a second painting session to bright sunshine and dry ground. As I walked along the route I had taken the night before it immediately became clear that last night was perhaps the perfect wintertime pasting conditions, as perfect as could be hoped in Britain at least! The fox was still exactly in place the next morning, and most importantly so was the orange/red gradient piece which had suffered so badly before. 

The sunlight dappled beautifully across this wall section, giving the entire surface a dappling of shadows which almost blended the works together, but just highlighing the face. I was really happy this piece had taken on the second attempt, as the colours of the gradients almost perfectly matched those of the graffiti on the wall behind, and together created a lovely palette of reds, oranges and pinks.

Next a work placed on a telephone terminal box looked all the more lovely in the light of day, bordered by a thick coverage of foliage. The way the work is seperated from the leaves and bushes really suggested the way we have genetically isolated these creatures from their natural, organic form.




The lighter coloured works definitely didnt have the same eyecatching impact as the darker versions, however they had a different kind of faded subtlety in their own right, faded into the background like an ethereal ghost.

I was so pleased to see the piece on a lampost in the middle of St. Stephens street had survived the night, and was getting lots of passing traffic on the streets. Because of the high passing foot traffic and easily reachable nature of this work, I didn't fancy it's chances at a long life, but for the while it stands it will certainly be seen and passed by many people.

It was also good to get some shots of people directly moving around my art, which is normally lacking in the graffitied walls I normally hit. After this I tried to catch a few more photos of people in context with the works, and thought this added an extra element to some of the shots, as I felt like some were getting a bit androgenous in format when viewed as a series.

I wittled my pictures down to another 5 final entires, and was overall much happier with the outcomes from this second outing in the city. The weather had really played a massive part in this I felt, as it had allowed the pieces to settled without interruption, and had also meant on the night I was less cold and rushed, and able to act more purposefully. I also felt, having hit the city once and then again in quick succession, I had a better map of potential locations and areas I still needed to cover in my head when going out, and was therefore able to focus my efforts much more consciously. I now really felt like I had covered a large portion of the functional centre of Norwich, and when walking back I noted that I passed several without even really thinking. See the next 5 photos as my final selection from this second attempt.
I will print all of these off and make them available with the rest of my physical work for your persual. I made the decision to crop the photos to square to mimic the instagram format through which so much of graffiti is disseminated, and through which I publicize and portfolio all of my street work.

As for my work throughout this project and just in general conclusion, I had some life stuff go on at the start of the year which sort of hampered my progress in the first months, and I didn't really engage with the initial SKILLS project due to my repeated issues with the etching progress, and also just my general uncertainty about the wastefulness of the process in relation to my own practice.

However I feel like after my trip to Hull and the Deep, I re-engaged my uni art practice, and have awoken a few new areas of enquiry that I would like to continue now even after assessment, particularly the tissue paper experiments which unfortunately I didn't progress further in this unit. Perhaps had I engaged with the tiger practice earlier in the unit through online readings as I did, I would have then been able to persue the controlled methods of compositional excecution inspired by the trip to the Ferens gallery, which the led to the tissue paper experiments, and then develop these ahead of assessment, but such is life.
However I do think this could be just a really exciting new exploration for wheatpasting as a media, and not something I have really seen done before to any great degree. So it is something I will definitely continue developing going forward.

As for my tiger pieces, I am really impressed with the professionalism (if such a word can be applied to graffiti) of the image I created. It wouldn't look out of place on a street in London or Bristol. The only thing I think I should be careful of in future ones is ensuring they are absolutely straight, especially on this piece with the column.
On the whole for this second attempt I was much more conscious of it, apart from the one in the middle of St. Stephens st because I was understandably in quite a rush about that one as it is such a hotspot for police cars and I didn't fancy getting caught with almost 40 tigers now adorning the city walls!

I think the project was a success, and hopefully with my accompanying material distributed on instagram, the widespread proliferation of the white tiger image, but in a variety of distrubed, alternate evokative varieties will definitely have people asking what all the tigers are about and googling the words 'white tigers' to find the second article down ' the truth about white tigers' and perhaps maybe even become educated in their probable misinformation.

After taking all of these pictures I went straight to the studio to prepare for submission. Although I feel like I had not created a large body of work, when it was all laid out against the wall and piled on the desk I actually realised I had produced quite a large amount of material. Another thing I was really pleased with was the definite development of a strong creative style in my work, and a profound voice as an artist I believe. So much so that upon showing people my space, multiple people immediately pointed to Ollie's lone piece in the top right and asked about that, immediately able to sense the profound difference in styles from one artist to another and pick that one as as differing from the rest.

With the addition of a couple of pieces of ivy, my corner of the studio was a cornucopia of biodiversity, with mammal, fish and insect, flora and fauna all represented in some format. It is the variety and creative beauty of life which has always fascinated me most, that specialness is what drives me to act to preseve it wherever I can, and I think that is well captured in my work.