Sophie Ashdown

At our Tuesday tutorial session on 21 April 2026, we started by reviewing this quote by Robert Henri:

This led to some interesting discussion about whether this statement is true or not. Personally I think the object is to make art, and the making of it forms part of the achievement. Sometimes we are lucky enough to just be in a “wonderful state which makes art inevitable” but that is not the real world. Certainly it is amazing when the rest of the world is shut out from my mind and I am absorbed in the creative process, but I also get immense satisfaction from completing a piece of work, so that remains the ultimate object of being an artist to me.

We then discussed this Venn diagram:

We were tasked with considering how each of these elements applied to ourselves and this is what I wrote down:

Idea: patterns, data, geometry, clean lines, precision

Material: canvas, paint, paper, data, collage (newly exploring this recently), monochrome palette

Process: research, planning, execution, adapting, perfecting, completing

Context: information age, left/right brain, order, making sense of the world, accepting how my brain works

Identity: technical artist, international background, techie geek, ex-corporate monkey, constructivist

Mood: ordered, patterned, precise, careful, clean, stark to some and comforting to others

This was an enlightening experiment to go through. Despite having both a technical and artistic brain, and previously feeling that I needed to concentrate on only one of these at a time, I have discovered that I am most comfortable in a place where I can be both at once. I operate in everyday life with both sides of my brain firing equally, and I can do that with my art too.

Writing the above is not what I imagined I would be writing towards the end of this course. I thought that I wanted to get away from the order and pattern of how I do things and be more “free”, but instead I have come to accept and embrace how I think and who I am as an artist.