My Tutor was happy with my work for Part Four of the PAD course.

He is asking me to keep in mind and work further on the following: 

1. To keep being more experimental and open to creative discoveries without being “prefixed” on specific initial ideas about the final result. 

My reflection: I fully understand and continue implementing his advice in my creative pursuit. I realised that two things helped me to be more experimental: the PAD course’s structure, which keeps pushing me to unknown territory, detaching me from the subjects I was comfortable drawing and painting. The second one is the ink as a medium. I engaged more for the Course: the ink is very unpredictable; it is fluid and artistic by itself, so every time you start working with it, you will have a lot of surprises. These two factors help me to reduce the number of “prefixed ideas”.

2. Keep developing the project with multiple viewpoints, and pay attention to similar artworks. 

Before I return to that project, I will research similar paintings. It is just a matter of the current workload. However, I was very happy my Tutor liked the composition since I did it subconsciously, without realising that the complexity of multiple viewpoints has a big deal of potential. 

3. To not be intimidated to bring my ethnic and cultural experience into my work. My Tutor recommended I look at the works of Lubaina Himid as she uses conventions of Western Art to present her position. (Specifically, her take on Hogarths’ Marriage a la Mode): https://www.everypicture.org/lubaina-himid

My reflection on the potential of my cultural background and Lubiana Himid’s interview. I followed my Tutor’s link and watched Lubiana Himid’s interview. It made me think about how I feel about the presence of my culture on an international scale and how it should be presented. Lubiana Himid has a strong voice for fighting to increase the presence of Black culture in its broadest sense into modern international cultural and political agenda. My agenda about my cultural heritage is different. I am not a fighter; moreover, I am so open to other cultures that I quickly immerse myself in them, drifting away from my language and detaching myself from my roots. Thus I don’t want to emphasise my ethnic or racial identity in my artwork. However, I appreciate my people’s culture and incorporate original vital visual elements into some of my works. Even though I continue to do so, I mix them with other cultures’ symbols and philosophies.