Personal Branding

Today, I attended a session as part of the future leaders programme that was based on personal branding. The session was led by Jacqui Malpass who is a marketing consultant and a private executive coach who has worked with senior personnel in the public and private sectors.
 
The session was designed to look at how to most effectively present yourself to prospective employers, specifically for graduate level roles. This session turned out to be a lot more helpful than I thought it would be.

Of the various aspects that we discussed on how to present yourself as an employable package, online presence was one of the key topics. This included various things such as what is on social media sites as well as blogs and professional profiles.

Jacqui pointed out that for many employers, when they google your name, seeing that you have an active blog (especially if the content relates to your professional interest) and have good links shows that you are self motivated and professional. Furthermore, you can link your pages together so that an employer can find out more about you, but with you steering them to what you want them to see. I have set up a LinkedIn site but have not as yet put anything on it, therefore, I will take some time to set up a proper profile and then put the link on one of the static pages of my wordpress site. This would be a good way for me to be able to show my creative efforts on my website but still keep a slant on myself as a professional.

Furthermore, I have since considered the role of the blog and think I will keep it but be limited with it’s use. I will use it to keep a record of exhibitions I visit and what I have observed/ gained in other areas. This will then mean that I can continue this for years to come and a potential school employer can get a feel for where my interests and knowledge lie within the field not just from my degree, but also from my own pursuits generally in life.

I now feel a lot clearer in where I am going with my website and what type of brand I want to give myself with it. I will complete the branding excercise she set us as this will then give me a definite path of exactly how my website should be percieved and what I want to be percieved as, as a result of this.

Thanks to Jacqui Malpass for her words of advice and Andy Thompson and Fiona Reid for organising the session.

Where do I start?

After having looked at a few websites and commented upon those that I feel contain elements that will inform the decisions about my own website, I need to think about where to start. I know I want my website to have an educational theme but also to promote myself as an artist.

For my future career, I want to be a practising art teacher, therefore the practice is important, but so is the educational potential. I want my website to demonstrate the balance that I want to have in myself as a professional. I do not want to be a teacher who doesn’t educate or develop their own understanding of the subject they teach, but I also do not want to just be absorbed in the practice without understanding it’s potential as an educational tool for others.

Therefore, I will approach this as I would a portfolio. My portfolio for PGCE interview took long and hard thought in terms of it’s structure, and I want to apply some of this structure to my website. By doing this I hope that my website will be able to act in portraying my range of technical skills whilst also being a way of demonstrating what is going on in my current practice. This is perhaps where the blog element to come in. Whilst I feel it would be inappropriate to create a frequent blog as this could make my site too informal, blogging important events (such as exhibitions etc) would help keep my site up to date and give a sense of continuity to my work and development. Whilst I also intend to expand my site after the module, the blog could almost act as a signifier to what is new. So I could for example blog about the degree show then have a page under ‘exhibitions’ dedicated to it. A person revisiting my site could know to look for it by the fact that it is in the blog feed.

Looking at use of wordpress blogs

Rhiannons site is very well organised and I liked how the subcategories are clearly labelled and easy to navigate. Also by having main categories and sub categories, Rhiannon has been able to display her art practice and her practical/ teaching experience in a way that a navigator can choose to focus on just one, or look at the whole range and see how they complimant each other.

Another element I feel is effective, is the testimonial she has included. This is a great way of self-promoting whilst showing how she has used her skills outside of an academic setting. This is something that I should perhaps consider to back up my experience.

Watch out to avoid spelling mistakes/typos. These can damage the professional facade of an otherwise successful website.

continued website research... Kim Abramson

In terms of format, this site is very different to Virginia Graham’s. The images are in a numbered gallery format. This format is very clean and organised and keeps the pages short. It is possible to see nearly all the page at once. This is something I feel is good as we can clearly see the design of the page and all the information put together. This would be a good design particularly for quick navigation (after all a potential employer or small scale commision client may only be checking my site for a minute).

The numbers are quite small and an inexperienced computer user  may not realise that they are there or how to access all the images. This is something that is very important to consider. Is the target audience necessarily going to be very computer literate? For me, I feel that this would be fine as teaching requires a certain level of IT competency so any potential employer would more than likely be more than familiar with these types of functions.

However, the format of the text etc is quite bland and reminiscent of the kind of format you get in a white cube gallery. This suits this artists purpose, as they are clearly demonstrating themselves as a fine artist, but for me I feel it would maybe percieved as stale. I want to work with young people so I want a format that demonstrates not only my professionalism as a teacher and as an artist, but also my freshness and enthusiasm that makes me suitable to work with young people.

Getting started... looking at other websites for ideas on how format matches function of websites.

This is a website where the artist is trying to sell her work in a commercial context. One of the first things I notice is that the colour scheme is very effeminate. This is clearly to cover her target audience of her work. This demonstrates the importance of finding the target audience and shaping the website to suit this.

The website is supported by many images, the artist is trying to sell her products and the images sell themselves. As a visual artist images can make or break a website and so the images need to be of high quality, strong and supportive of the contents of the website.

I also notice how the artist (or the person she pays to maintain/create her website) writes about her in the third person. By doing this, the website clearly aims the focus of the potential client on her work, rather than herself as a person. Also it seems very professional and this is an element I feel that perhaps I should employ in my own webpage, as I would like to promote myself as a teacher which is a profession that requires an element of professionalism. Also by doing this, I feel that I can distinguish between myself and my practice as a set of transferable skills.

The sidebars and relatively small pages make for easy access (long pages mean a lot of reading and difficulty in locating the appropriate information that is required) however the light grey text is quite hard to see and requires a degree of concentration to see it. This is something I want to avoid, as if I send my web address to potential placement schools/ employers and they make the effort to check it out, I want to ensure they have an easy time navigating my sight and getting to know my work.

Finally, I note that Virginia includes her CV as part of her website. As my own site is to be a tool for helping me with employment, this is something I could consider adding. I would also consider basing my website around the information given in it as an employer could then read my CV and use my website to see images and extended information about these areas. Clearly labelled tabs with the same headings as those on my CV will ease this navigation.

Exhibition Info- Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley

In my work, I am still striving to learn about colour balance and how this effects the feel of a piece. I was inspired by this video recommended to me by Jan Knight. I like how Riley has taken a fresh look at the older paintings and how she has found the energy within pieces by breaking them down in her own mind to influence her own work. The results are very different to the original inspiration but it is the initial energy flow that is important. As a result of seeing this video I am going to go to the Cardiff Museum and see if I can do the same with some of the older pieces there. For the first time ever I may be able to find interest in the old masters.

Bridget Riley- Contemporary artist learning from the old masters

I saw the Turner Prize entry of Angela de la Cruz last November (2010) in the Tate Britain and was instantly inspired. I liked how she had manipulated canvas so that it was no longer on a frame like traditional painting but how it retained some of its shape and structure (ie the frame made into sculptural elements) so that it was still in a sense a painting rather than a sculpture. I like how her work crosses boundries and fills the grey area between painting and sculpture. Perhaps this could be a way for me to bring my work to life and to make the viewer take notice of the good feeling… by forcing it into their space.

Looking Back….

Looking back at my posts from last year I see some of the same old things have started to re-emerge, most notably the want to replicate memories. I am not sure whether it is because I hold memories dearly or whether I just like to make my own life difficult! Either way upon reflection I have remembered some things I learnt about my work last year and hope that now I can build on them to produce something a little more successful. I also realise how I am always drawn to getting paintings of the frame and am itching to get my technique to a ’t’ so I can start exploring this element more to see if it works in creating a positive tone as much as I had success last year with a negative piece. 

I come back to this blog and a bit of time has passed. I have looked at the elements that portray emotion and have made initial studies based on this research. I have also looked at the connotations of colour and created my own journals of colour mixes in order to thoroughly investigate what makes a colour portray affection. I have looked at German and American expressionism in order to obtain influence in how to use marks and othertechniques to create abstractions that highlight certain elements of a composition… and now I am at a stage where I am starting to bring all this together…

I have looked at these artists for the way they have placed colours together and also for their balance of colours within their compositions as I feel this needs to be considered as carefully as the marks made during abstraction. I hope that by combining a thorough understanding of the various elements of my study, I can then produce a series of paintings which will enable understanding and reflection.

I loved this painting by an American Artist called Lynne Noele Rushton. It is titled ‘Welcome Home’ and I feel this is a perfect example of capturing a moment with lots of emotion. View high resolution

I loved this painting by an American Artist called Lynne Noele Rushton. It is titled ‘Welcome Home’ and I feel this is a perfect example of capturing a moment with lots of emotion.

I wanted to find inspiration from artists who actually showed humanity and society in a celebratory light as this is the route I would like to take in my own work. Eileen Cooper is an example of this. I like her work for its bold use of colour and striking forms. I like how the situation is not immediately obvious and figures are often repeated but the colour and the happy facial features give these paintings an upbeat tone. The images shown are titled:- 1. Bathing in your shadow, 2. Bits of you and me, 3. Gift, 4. Lovers meet at journeys end, 5. New Baby, 6. The Babies, 7. Walking on air.

Here I am with my final piece on the day of set-up. The smile is more of relief than anything but I am glad I got my piece up and how my experiments actually resulted in contributing to the final piece in their arrangement. View high resolution

Here I am with my final piece on the day of set-up. The smile is more of relief than anything but I am glad I got my piece up and how my experiments actually resulted in contributing to the final piece in their arrangement.

(Reblogged from laura-cerys)

Another accidental discovery…

After setting up my piece for assessment, I had inadvertantly created a contrast that madeit quite clever. I had used a real object (the bedsheet) to create a representation and hung up my other bedsheet studies that ended up representing walls. Just for somewhere to put my drawing I suspended it from the string in the ‘corner’. This then made a representational piece (a drawing) become a real object as it appeared to be a drawing hung from the wall. This juxtaposition of realities makes the space intrigueing (if by accident hehe) and now I recognise it, it is certainly something I will consider manipulating in my work in the future.