BFAP Magazine 2023 - Flipbook - Page 5
Foreword
I am proud to present to you the 2023 Brighton BA Fine
Art Painting graduate exhibition. What you’ll see in these
pages and in the show itself, are the fruits of thirty-five
individual journeys across the wild terrains of meaning.
There is no easy roadmap for making art. You don’t
just come up with an idea and then paint a picture out
of it. Art is so much more than that. True, whatever the
medium you choose, you need to gain some kind of
expertise so that the physical materialisation of your
thoughts looks something like it did in your head, but
there is so much more to the practice of art than that.
What is ‘expertise’ except to practice your medium well?
Yet if your medium is as complex as language, where a
primal howl can sometimes carry more truth than a wellrehearsed thesis, is expertise necessarily about refinement?
And where do your ideas come from? How do you generate
them? Are the ideas you think you’re working with the
real ideas behind what you’re doing? Indeed, what is an
idea? In the age of the snappy meme and the sound-bite,
how is it that we can still be moved by the slowness of a
simple painting of flowers, a portrait, colours arranged on
a surface, a few gestures? Is an image not an idea too?
Art at its best reaches through your eyes to tug at your
soul. It bypasses words and can break your heart, or
mend it, or terrify you, or leave you utterly confused.
Sometimes it can even make you laugh, or at least
feel a little less alone. The truth that all makers of art
one day realise is that the work itself is the meaning: a
marriage of subject and medium where the manifestation
of form itself is the thing that creates significance.
But even that isn’t the end of it because where the creation
of the work finishes, the perception of it by you, the viewer,
begins, and then it’s about your relationship with the work
once the author has left the stage; a kind of orphaned
immortality looking for a home, a meaning in your hearts.
And what did these rare blooms grow out of? A divorce
from a continent, a pandemic, the precipice of war,
in a time when politicians behave more like clowns
while comedians prove themselves far better as heads
of state. All of that when you should have been simply
concentrating on your first independence and whole worlds
of meaning in the new relationships you’re forming.
I am perennially astounded that anyone can begin to
assimilate all of this in only three years of a degree course,
even more so under current circumstances, but here we
are looking at this glorious harvest of works, proof that
this is exactly what all of these graduates have done.
You should be astounded, too.
Christopher Stevens
Course leader
BA (hons) Fine Art Painting
University of Brighton