Sophie Ashdown

I’m still working on defining my research paper topic and it is not going well.

I have spent an alarming amount of time searching online using the library tools, general web searches, and reading through some of my constructivist-related books. Whilst I have come up with some ideas, nothing really excited me. I don’t want to write a paper about something that I don’t connect with.

On Friday I *thought* I had a brilliant idea, and I was quite excited about it. After talking about personality types with a friend, she wondered if artists’ personality types were related to the type of art they make. I thought “ah ha” – I could research the personality types of loads of artists and compare these to the types of art they make, particularly looking for correlations with abstract/geometric/constructivist style art vs figurative/freeflowing/impressionist style art.

I messaged a couple of art groups I am in, including the New Constructivists group, and asked them to test their personality types using this link, which would give them their Myers-Briggs personality type. There are 16 different types and I started looking for correlations.

Within an hour I had almost 30 responses, and there seemed to be some interesting early correlations. For example four of the five Constructivist artists all had type ENFJ (myself included.) And amongst other artists there were a high number of versions of this type.

I started thinking that this was great and I would have fun collating and comparing the data, making charts, doing comparisons, coming up with algorithms, etc. Then I stopped and realised that this was becoming about data analysis rather than art research. I took a step back and thought that I’d better check in with Jonathan before I went much further.

So I emailed Jonathan to describe my idea and ask whether it was viable.

Amazingly he responded within an hour, and gave me a considered response to my query. In true Jonathan style, he didn’t tell me my idea was bad or tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, but raised some questions and thoughts for me to consider.

Key to these were:

• What is the benefit of understanding personality types and how it relates to artistic approaches?
• It is quantitative rather than qualitative
• The topic could be too large
• Personality tests are notoriously subjective and Myers Briggs in particular are known to have significant issues

It became clear quite quickly that the idea was not really viable in the way that I had presented it, which I think I already knew when I emailed him. If I was already questioning its viability on the first day of the idea, then it wasn’t likely to be a winner!

I’m glad that I didn’t spend the weekend going down another rabbit hole of research and analysis on this topic that wasn’t going to work.

I responded to Jonathan that “my technically-minded brain seems to want to go down a quantitative route rather than qualitative so I need to adjust this.  I’m so used to working with technology and data, that I grasped onto something that felt familiar rather than something that challenges me as an artist.  Although admittedly I was quite excited about the topic initially.  

I’ve looked at the research topics from the second years, which has helped me realise that I need to be narrower in specifying the topic.  The wordcount for the paper doesn’t lend itself to huge wide-ranging topics.

I’m still looking for something with a constructivist angle, relating perhaps to how it has evolved in Britain through the decades but that seems too general.  Over the weekend I’ve been looking at how I could relate the aesthetic elements of constructivism to how data is visualised today.  This would cover my interest in both constructivism and technology, but again I think I would need to narrow the focus on this, perhaps looking at specific constructivist artists or artworks.”

Of course I want to do research on a topic that I’m interested in, but I’ve realised that I need to separate my personal artistic pursuits from my goals for the paper. I keep going down rabbit holes of research into types of work that I want to create myself, rather than study in depth. So I’m readjusting my brain for that.

I will continue the search and intend to have something viable soon!