The past month has seen some interesting developments on the “professional” artist path I began walking a few years ago when I started my Fine Art degree. So, it seemed like a good time to take stock, and write a few things about them.
I started my degree in 2007, initially thinking I’d study painting to improve my comic art skills. One of my goals was to come close to the sort of work Jon J Muth & Kent Williams achieved with books like Moonshadow and Meltdown. Around that time, the fact I’d released the first two parts of Surfing The Deathline lead to me doing a bunch of rough pencils and page & layout designs for a company pitching comics as a reading aid. That lead to me delivering studio session workshops to school groups at the Art Gallery of NSW, as a part of the Osamu Tezuka exhibition. Something had to give, and so I switched my degree to part-time. In 2008 I got my first chance to get into the studios for specialist disciplines, with rotations through painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and photography.
To my surprise, I absolutely fell in love with ceramics, sculpture and photography, and loathed painting. In photography, I was able to dive deep into serious art-making almost straight away, and over that first 4 weeks, created the Cages series of images. In the second 5 week rotation, the Flight / Fight images were produced, and I started thinking sculpturally in terms of photographing things I’d constructed. While I enjoyed ceramics a great deal, it turned out that it was sculpture which truly captured my heart.
Three years later, I completed my sculpture major, and had my end of year show. A few months after that, I had my first piece in a large outdoor exhibition, and now a year later, and 6.5 years after starting my degree, I’ve had my graduation. Oh yeah, more importantly, I’ve had a yet-to-be-made work accepted for the 2014 Sculpture By The Sea exhibition at Bondi.
That leaves a year and a half to fill, so what am I going to do with the time? Well, in the same week of my graduation, I received word that I’d been awarded my first grant by the Australia Council – Australia’s main public arts funding body.
The grant itself is called ArtStart, and is for a pretty tidy sum – $10k. Now, it’s not free money to do with as I please, rather, it’s specifically for business development and training. Every cent had to be budgeted and money couldn’t be used for living expenses, making or exhibiting work, or paying oneself a salary. So, the final outcome is that I’m going to buy a rather fancy camera setup, and do a bunch of training in what amounts to product photography, as well as some accredited SketchUp 3D / Architectural design classes.
So, over the course of less than a month I got into one of the most important sculpture exhibitions in Australia, received my Bachelor’s degree, and got a nice big arts grant. Right at the moment, I seem to be making this thing work.