DIARY: VISITING THE SAATCHI GALLERY

I'd been meaning to go again for ages, but today after meeting a friend in Kensington, I got to take a stroll down Kings Road and visit one of my favourite (if not the favourite) gallery in London. The Saatchi Gallery always has a nice range of work in a site that is perfectly sized and also kitted with a lovely bookshop too. With its exhibition halls filled with works from Russia this season, I particularly enjoyed the room with paintings by Valery Koshlyakov, the Moscow cityscape on a cardboard canvas much like my experimental work back in A-Level Fine Art. Cardboard's such an interesting medium to paint on, with its varied textures and flexible manipulatability. Of course, these pieces were quite massive, but impressive up close and from afar. 

Perhaps more intriguing for me, however, was to witness such musings of art having myself progressed so much as a designer in recent months. I'm midway through my Design degree after switching from Medicine and I do believe my way of thinking has evolved greatly and my intuition much improved also. This means that the gap between art and design is larger than ever in my mind. Whilst design is very much present everywhere as it discreetly shapes the entire world in which we live, art seems to require self-declaration, screaming and shouting to express itself. And especially as a designer that wants to consider and justify all of my choices, to follow logical and natural steps in my work, I frequently found myself stood in front of a piece struggling to grasp what I was looking at (and why). It bothered me how much disorder there was and what was seemingly careless. Take Gosha Ostretsov's bizarre installation or Dasha Shishkin's disturbing drawings, for example.

I'm sure there's much here for me to learn and potentially harness for my own practice, but right now, reflecting at 2am, I'm rather puzzled and stuck so I record these thoughts down for future-me to look over and digest. I'm sure there are things of great use for me from today's visit with regards to influence and progress, I'm just not really certain what.

Thanks for reading by the way...