4.1 Turn your ideas into visual language

Think about ideas in terms of simple images

Just as you want to produce more evidence and make better decisions by solving only one issue or creative problem in a picture, one at a time, rather than by trying to solve everything in one go, so too do you want to approach ideas in the same way:

Think of one concept and try to address that in one picture or work
Try to work on from this and embellish if or build it up in a second picture or work. Then, develop it further in a third work

Always to try to keep the approach to making visual work simple:

Work one idea at a time
Respond to the work that you have just made when you try to extend it into the next piece
Work over a series or sequence of images
Don’t try to get every aspect correct, all in one work

Do not try to illustrate complex narratives

Remember that your work has to function as art first. That it is worth looking at because of its visual language and then only as an expression of your ideas as a secondary point.

If you make it well, people will want to look at it for its visual merit and, it is likely, they will get the ideas that you are trying to convey through the way that you make the piece rather than because you come up with an ‘all encompassing and world beating idea’ and then merely illustrated that idea.

Good examples to consider here are:

Whilst each of these artists offers the viewer complex images with highly finished and realised images, they each also focus on one aspect of the picture in each work.

The viewer can look at a series of works and see how the artist progresses and explores the issues and ideas that the works carry, from work to work.

You should use this approach with your ideas and develop a sequence of works that work, one at a time to build your ideas and the arguments, as you would with sentences in an essay.

Remember: “drawing is thinking”: the meaning is in the making

An important point to remember is that the art must come first. Sometimes, students make the mistake of thinking that the ideas outweigh the production of art. That is quite wrong at any point in your development.

You must always remember that a the art comes first and the course is about making and doing first and thinking and considering narratives later on.

Remember that we look at particular artists and their work because of the way that they make art - not necessarily because of what the meaning might be. Meanings are important, but they are secondary.

Take for example these two pictures: one is by Kirchner and the other is by Max Pechstein.

Left: Kirchner

Above: Pechstein

Two painters working side by side

Both paintings are the same subject. Both were painted at the same time and both were intending to present and expressionist image of the young girl in the green and black striped dress with red shoes.

The one by Kirchner is though by far the more advanced and daring work in which space is compressed and the immediacy and confidence of the painting style is conveyed through each detail: the direct black brushstrokes describe the ay the figure stretches the material of the dress and twists into the pose of the girl.

Look at the stripes

By contrast, although he painting by Pechstein is more than competent, it lacks the same level of panache and vigour. With Pechstein’s brush, the strokes that describe the stripes are somewhat run of the mill. They don’t suggest anything other than what we might expect to see of anyone painting this subject in an expressionist style.

Good and much better

To be sure, there are good elements to the Pechstein, it is clear in the drawing and economically handled, but it lacks the daring, immediacy and brilliance of the Kirchner, which appears in contrast to be supremely confident and dramatically direct in its execution. With Kirchner, there is no ‘filler’ element, no padding. Everything is there for a purpose and becomes part of the whole image.

We are carried along by the way Kirchner paints to a level that we don’t reach with Pechstein and this is why it is the more famous and well regarded of the two images. Both paintings advance similar ideas, but one is remembered.

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