Macmillan Prize

Children's book, parallel pages beginning from opposite sides of the book

 

Centre of the book

 The End

External Project - Macmillan Prize Development

My selection for the external project demanded quite a large body of work compared to some of the other possibilities. As such, after I had settled on an idea I made a series of roughs very quickly before moving on and allocating the remainder of my time to the completion of the 32 page book the competition demanded.

The inspiration for my book came primarily from the works of two of my favourite artists. Both artists capture a wonderful sense of adventure in their work and seem to dwell on ideas of escapism, dreams and imagination. These elements were also at the forefront of one of my (and many other people’s) own favourite children’s books, Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

From Zac Gorman’s work, I appreciated the plaintive sentimentality and sense of nostalgia that ultimately defines his quiet but emotionally resonant works for me. Similarly, I admire in Eiichiro Oda’s series ‘One Piece’ his ability to communicate significant events through extremely compact, single panel scenes, each full of energy.

Maurice Sendak 'Where the Wild Things Are'

Eiichiro Oda 'One Piece'

Zac Gorman

As such, my children’s book ultimately followed an adventurous child, finding wonderment and danger within their everyday surroundings. This allowed me to keep things over the fairly significant length of the book (a longer if not denser narrative than I have created certainly) while embodying the same themes and feelings as some of my favourite art, if nowhere near as successfully or poignantly.

Suffolk Studies

It was my expectation that the end product of my course project would relate to the transformation of the Southbank. However over the course of the winter holidays my focus shifted considerably. Visiting Suffolk I was surrounded by evidence of storm damage. Compared to the changes of the Southbank, I found these sights of destruction to ultimately be the more arresting in that they were capable of communicating a change that had occurred without any need for comparisons to the landscape’s earlier state.

Stormdamage photos

I maintained the use of brightly clashing coloured inks to capture the environment as I felt that they evoked the surreal nature of certain scenes and their own striking juxtaposition. An example of this would be the boat, left stranded in isolation within an expansive field; having been washed in a flood then remaining after the water had receded. As such, I depicted the boat in an alien mixture of yellow and blue against a primarily green field.

Suffolk Studies

This separation of elements within the compositions persisted into my final outcome for the course. It was suggested that I animate some of the scenes in a simple manner in order to make the images more dynamic. In doing so, I divided the compositions into elements that moved and elements that remained static (for example, the wheat of the field swaying against the stationary form of the boat), attempting to communicate the sense of the elements not belonging together. Likewise, I exaggerated the clash of colours by allotting a single bright colour to each element; however the scenes ultimately benefitted from a grounding compositional element of grey, ultimately creating a scene that maintained a kind of realistic weight despite its intended weirdness.

Animation frames

Southbank Studies

At this point in time I relocated to the Southbank to make my studies. Unbeknownst to m, the Christmas festival was under construction at the time. At one point my subject became obscured as a large tent was erected in front of me. Instead of moving to try and regain site of my previous subject, I instead experimented with the coloured inks and found that I could overlay the new formation atop the previous studies without sacrificing the clarity of either.

Using this effect, I tried to communicate the motion of individuals from one state too another using a sequence of partially overlapping images, inspired the repetitious dynamic shapes of Futurist artworks, gradually shifting from one hue to another over the course of the sequence. However, the haste required to accomplish these quick studies often left the forms of the individual sequences rather static and uninterested when considered outside of the overall sequence.

Balla 'Girl Running on the Balcony' 1912

In light of this, I began to focus on the more gradual transformation of the surroundings in preparation for the Christmas festival. In conjunction to the formation of these new structures, there was a clear change upon the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s death; a swell of flowers around his Southbank monument that then slowly whittled away again over time.

Course Project - Barbican, Cambridge, Workshop

The initial studies of my ‘En Plein Air’ course project began around the Barbican Centre and later explored the larger area of Cambridge. I did not begin with a single subject focus; instead I tried to achieve a balance of human activity, organic and inorganic structures around these environments. I found capturing human activity to be the most challenging, or rather I found it difficult to record any change in the surroundings, whether it manifested in an individual or an environment. This process would later become my focus in this particular project.

Early on, I primarily employed the use of watercolours in my studies as they were easily used to demark colour and shapes. However, they were visually rather drab and weak, in contrast to the studies that I made using black ink and a dry brush, paying less reverence to the physical actuality of forms and objects.

Barbican Studies

Cambridge Studies

 For the most part I continued to utilise watercolours until a studio work shop. Making studies of assembled disparate objects I was encouraged to experiment with coloured inks, irrespective of how little resemblance the colours of my available inks bore to the various objects. Using the distinct shades in a specific sequence, creeping out from a single corner of the page, I could effectively record the order in which I drew each object so long as I remembered the specific sequence of colours (red, green, blue, orange). It was at this point that I developed an interest in attempting to record change and development in my observations whilst maintaining a comfortable distance from too realistic a facsimile of my subject.

Workshop Image

Miscellaneous Assorted Images