British Folk Art | More notes

Further notes from reading this book.

          pg 14 - 'The appeal of folk, of the amateur or non-artist, may be that they come with a very unique skill set rooted in a vocational knowledge that influences a particular visual language'

          pg 15 - 'shop signs and their symbols descended from heraldry or history...

...These oversized objects as signs pre-dated numbered addresses and would have acted as a kind of shorthand understood by the illiterate or the traveller'

Shop signs

          pg 15 - 'But the folk painter is interested in more than just symbols...he is very much a storyteller, not averse to embellishing his picture with an accompanying text or short story to set the scene, or a rhyme that might give the viewer a smile'

'(Referring to the Tate exhibition)...This is an exhibition of strange and exquisite objects, and though we may not know the name of every maker, all were created by individuals'

'At a time when 3D printing can manufacture guns or replicate machines with moving parts, the reminder of the hand-made object, with its brilliant imperfections and anomalies, is a thing to celebrate'

Fred Mizen with the Lion and the Unicorn

from the Festival of Britain 1951

Tutorial & Ideas for Practical

Discussing my ideas in the tutorial today made me realise I'm more on track than I feel I am. I am enjoying my research at the moment, and I find compiling information from all of these different sources and making connections between them to be really interesting.

Although I think my research could very well fit into more than one category (such as historical, aesthetic, social...) it was decided that I should class it within the theme of Culture. Although this word embodies a lot of different things itself.

When looking at the definition of culture, it seems to be quite fitting to the work I've been doing so far:

1. the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively

2. the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society

The tutorial brought up some possible areas for me to research and look into, including:

• Looking at theory/texts from fields such as anthropology, art theory, sociology
• Authenticity - and its relation to meaning/value in visual arts
• Narrative - communicating stories, a message, or values
• Work focusing on meaning rather than aesthetic/accuracy

mind map from sketchbook

I'm starting to bring together theory and the practical side of things to see where I could take my work when I begin my sketchbook exploration.

In terms of image making, I think I should focus on looking at and using symbols, pictograms, simple forms combined with bright colours to depict bigger ideas and themes in a simple way (much like on the quilts I've been looking at, when small appliqué designs are sewn on to a larger piece)

I even thought about making my practical research more personal, relating it to me, my heritage, where I'm from. This would involve carrying out primary research too which is authentic and would allow my project to take it's own route.

This personal aspect would go hand-in-hand with folk art, as it would be about family, stories, real people and places. There is also the regional quality of it too.

Primary research is something I enjoyed doing last year too with my visual narratives project. Collecting original information in this way could be beneficial to my work this time around too.

Study Task 2 | Establishing a Research Question

What is your theme?

• Folk art and meaning in the visual arts
• Meaning through: communicating ideas, stories, messages, authenticity of aesthetic and content, real people and real experiences

Why?

• I'm personally interested in this, and it feeds into my own work and what I think is important within it (meaning, authenticity).

Who are your theorists - what texts - sources of info?

• The Unsophisticated Arts - Barbara Jones
(Little Toller Books, Dorset, 2013)

• British Folk Art - Ruth Kenny, Jeff McMillan, Martin Myrone
(Tate Publishing, London, 2014)

• Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective - Alan Male
(AVA Publishing, 2007)

Practitioners or practical examples?

Grayson Perry

The Agony in the Car Park, 2012

The Rosetta Vase, 2011

More to come.........

Who or what are your 'primary' theorists or texts?

• I don't have any 'primary' theorists or texts yet. So far, I've been reading and looking at people who are practitioners themselves, or who have ideas on art theory, social theory, etc.

• Barbara Jones (artist, curator, writer), Jean Dubuffet (Collection de l'art brut), Jeff McMillan (artist), Martin Myrone (curator), Edward Bawden (Life in an English Village)

• Lawrence Zeegen (when talking about illustration)

• Need to read more into art theories on folk/naive/lo-fi art...

How is it related to visual culture / image making / illustration?

• Meaning in the visual arts, the art of the people, how meaning is communicated through symbolism, content, and message, and an accurate style or aesthetic isn't completely needed to aid this.

• The idea of authenticity, ideas coming from personal experiences and feelings, thoughts, stories, conversations, myths, stories that have been passed down. 

• Formal training / accurate artistic style isn't necessary in order to provide authentic and meaningful pieces of art.

The Unsophisticated Arts by Barbara Jones (2013)

Foreword by Peter Blake

• 'My interests were very much toward the popular arts: fairground decoration, typography, seaside souvenirs'

• Life in an English Village - Edward Bawden (1949)

• The Isle of Wight - Barbara Jones (1950)

• Festival of Britain exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery 'Black Eyes and Lemonade' (Organised by Barbara Jones and Tom Ingram) (1951)

Introduction by Simon Costin

• '...I find myself at home surrounded by many of the objects Barbara Jones wrote about: fairground art, waxworks, Punch & Judy figures, stuffed animals, corn dollies, fireworks, shell-encrusted vases...'

• pg 10 (regarding the Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibition) '...is it folk art? Is it vernacular art? Is it pop art or outsider art?'

• pg 10-11 '..by putting the machine-made and the hand-made side by side, she blurred the boundaries between what was considered art'

Black Eyes and Lemonade, exhibition poster from 1951

Preface by Barbara Jones

• pg 15 'This book is about the things that people make for themselves or that are manufactured in their taste'

• 'Most of the folk arts are dead, or self-consciously preserved by societies. Most of them were handicrafts; we can say with certainty that smocking, quilting, Morris dancing, mumming, corn dollies, weaving, and so on, are definitely folk'

• 

Proposal Outline

Here is a basic outline of my research for today's seminar session. I've included the mind map to show my thought process and themes, as well as including historical and contextual references to support it.

From Folk Culture to Modern British | Varoom Mag

An article from Varoom 11, 2009
[website]

Hopefully they will have more issues of Varoom in the library so I can take a closer look.

Collecting Texts & Articles

MEANING/PURPOSE/AUTHORSHIP IN THE VISUAL ARTS

• 'Where is the content? Where is the comment?' Lawrence Zeegen (2012)

• 'The Fundamentals of Illustration' Lawrence Zeegen

• 'The Missing Critical History of Illustration' Rick Poynor, Print Magazine, 2010

• 'Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective' Alan Male


CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH

• 'British Folk Art' Ruth Kenny, Jeff McMillan, Martin Myrone

• 'The Unsophisticated Arts' by Barbara Jones

• http://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/british-folk-art-tate-britain/

• https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/09/british-folk-art-review-tate-britain

---> Stuff like this is often damned with the faint praise of being called craft rather than art. What's the difference? Art has ideas and imagination. Classing popular art as craft is a way of stripping it of power, by seeing it as mere handiwork without any deep meaning."

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/23/folk-art-tate-britain

"Blending the lines between high and low, art and artefact"

• http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/british-folk-art

• http://blog.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/martin-myrone-like-a-great-circus-tent-folk-art-art-history-and-the-museum/

• Military Quilts/Crimean War Quilts -  http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/military-quilt/

• Estonian Lending Library/Decorative books - http://www.nlib.ee/national-library-of-estonia-celebrates-its-anniversary-with-an-exhibition-on-the-metsiku-lending-library-and-a-book-about-the-librarys-archival-collection/

• Margarete Naumann lace designs 

FURTHER LINKS AND SUBJECTS

• Grayson Perry - pottery and tapestries. Depict everyday people and stories.
http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/exhibitions/touring/grayson-perry-the-vanity-of-small-differences

• http://www.call-me-naive.com/tag/british-folk-art/

• Museum of British Folklore -   http://www.museumofbritishfolklore.com/news_archive/

British Folk Art | Tate Britain Book

'This publication...traces a number of interesting thresholds

between the worlds of 'fine' and 'folk' art' (pg 6)

still from The House That Jack Built, 1958, British Pathé

• 'Every man is an artist' - Joseph Beuys

• Jeff McMillan's essay 'The House that Jack Built'

          pg 11 - 'British visual culture today draws from its own rich history of folk art. With artists like Tracey Emin making quilts and embroideries, Grayson Perry producing tapestries and pots, and Bob and Roberta Smith painting signs, what were once traditional approaches have been updated and embraced by contemporary art.

• Folk Archive (2005) - exhibition by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane

          pg 12 - 'Broadly speaking, outsider art involves a self-taught artist working in a particularly idiosyncratic, highly individual manner, often driven by compulsion, desire, or religious fervour'

          'A generalisation about folk art might be to say that it has its origin in tradition. It has been passed down and therefore is representative of a collective'

          The word folk 'works like an umbrella to cover many other terms such as 'vernacular', 'popular', 'rural', 'traditional' and is a second cousin to labels like 'self-taught', 'naive', and 'outsider'.

          'The exhibition spans some 300 years from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century - an end date that reflects the period before folk art arguably became a commodity or too self-conscious'

Crimean War quilt c.1850 - 1900

          pg 13 - 'In 1769 when the Royal Academy was established, there was a desire to distinguish the fine arts from crafts, so that 'no needlework, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell work, or any such baubles should be admitted'...'

          'A great quality to be found in many works of folk art is the inventive use of waste or excess materials...This is an art mostly by, and for, the working class'

          'Many of these works represent a kind of condensation: a thing boiled down to its essence. The sense of time, the sheer labour involved, along with the at times intimate, miniaturised scale, suggest an interior (or internalised) work...

          For sailors working at sea, this is evidence of killing time. For young girls, long hours spent embroidering alphabets and maps demonstrating that they had learnt useful skills, knowledge, commitment and maturity'

Study Task 4 | Images Through Theory

We were put into pairs and allocated words/terms at random. We had to find the following:• Definition
• How it relates to visual culture / any examples of theory
• Examples of images
• How could you use it to interpret your theme/question?

1. Meta-communication

Communication about communication. It is secondary communication (including indirect cues) about how a piece of information is meant to be interpreted. It is based on the idea that the same message accompanied by different meta-communication can mean something entirely different, for example with irony where the opposite is meant.

The term was popularised by Gregory Bateson to refer to "communication about communication", which he expanded to refer to "all exchanged cues and propositions about (a) codification* and (b) relationship between the communicators".

*in linguistics, codification is the process of standardizing and developing a norm for a language.

Theory - Psychology - In the early 70s, Gregory Bateson coined the term to describe the underlying messages in what we say and do. Meta-communication is all the nonverbal cues (tone of voice, body language, gestures, facial expression, etc.) that carry meaning to enhance/disallow what we say in words.

How it relates to visual culture? - Advertising, branding, logos are a universal language of sorts and can communicate a corporation or service and its values by using simple shapes, pictograms, and visual symbols.

Road signs designed by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir. They are simple and easy to understand, used nationally as well as internationally.

Very well-known examples of logos that represent entire corporations. We see the McDonalds logo and immediately understand that we can go there to eat.

2. Realism

The quality or fact of representing a person or thing in a way that is accurate and true to life.

Realism (art movement) - Revolted against the aesthetic traits of the Romantic movement (exotic subject matter, exaggerated dramatised emotionalism) and instead intended to portray real life and typical situations and people. Unpleasant aspects of life and reality would not be ignored, as conveying a sense of accuracy was important.

Realist works depicted people of all walks of life and tended to reflect changes brought along by the Industrial and Commercial revolutions.

How does it relate to visual culture? - Regarding the actual art movement of Realism, or an aesthetic style in which the subject matter is conveyed in a realistic manner. In terms of illustration, it could relate to reportage or documentary art where the style may not look 100% accurate but its content is based on real people, conversations, and experiences.

Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners, 1857

Olivier Kugler's reportage illustration

How could this relate to my research?

I could use what I found out about metacommunication and its relation to advertising/signage and focus on using visual symbols and pictograms to communicate something visually in a simple and straightforward way, hoping that it could be readily understood by an audience.

With realism, I could relate it to my research by basing my practical work on information that links to real people, places, communities, as opposed to it being completely imaginary or made up.

Illustration: A Theoretical & Contextual Perspective by Alan Male

A book from the library that could inform/tie in with the portion of my research that investigates meaning in the visual arts. In this case, illustration specifically. However I'm not sure if this is too specific, and if it would be more fitting for PPP.

"Illustration: a definition

Applied imagery; a 'working art' that visually communicates context to audience"

Chapter 1 - Education

pg 14. 'Successful, forward-thinking illustrators need to be educated, socially and culturally aware communicators utilising a breadth of intellectual and practical skills'

pg 16. Developing the brief - 'The project should be an example of one of the following: either a professional practice area of context or a question that needs answering, creating a need to research and present new knowledge'

The Rationale - why are you undertaking this task;
The Aim - what is it you are going to do?
And;
The Objectives - how you intend to proceed; a clear list of methodologies to be employed.

pg 19. 'Illustration influences the way we are informed and educated, what we buy and how we are persuaded to do things. It gives us opinion and comment. It provides us with entertainment and tells stories'

pg 22. 'Having an understanding of the audience is essential for the successful transfer of messages'

Nigel Owen sketchbook pages

'reveal the creative and conceptual processes..and notes related to

solving problems of visual communication'

pg 24. 'The pursuit of knowledge and information is a prerequisite to eminent, professional illustration practice'

pg 37. Drawing - 'Drawing is the principal faculty of illustration. It is the foundation on which visual imagery is built. It forms the basis of all styles of illustration, from representational realism to avant-garde abstraction. Every illustration has to be conceived, designed and rendered to completion and drawing plays a part in all of this.

Drawing also informs the illustrators' identity and develops and establishes one's personal iconography. 

'We draw to understand our subject matter' James McMullin, New York, Sept 1996

Chapter 3 - The role of illustration

pg 88. 'Generally speaking, illustration is a great instructional medium. Information can be ingested more readily when conveyed visually'

pg 100. Illustration is embedded in the fields of anthropology and archaeology..'The essence of this work is collaboration between experts and the illustrator; a direct interface between the subject discipline and visual arts practice'

 Paul Bowman's illustration/visual art on the Balkan conflict

pg 116. The Illustrator as Scientist and Cultural Historian
'The status of the commercial art practitioner has increased in recent years with seemingly more responsibility for context and content'

'Professional and student illustrators undertaking research, commissioned and/or given project work will often be required to engage with specialist subject matter'

pg 117. 'The best art and design undergraduate education encourages the acquisition of appropriate and transferrable skills that are not only practical, but intellectual and knowledge based; the command of written and oral language, presentation and research'