Rachel Goodyear

Rachel Goodyear is an illustrator who has exhibited her work in the uk and internationally. Her style of work is fine art and she specialises in drawing. She studied fine art at university and graduated in 2000.  I attended a seminar in which she was discussing her journey as an artist and her style of work and the path that she has taken within the industry.
She is self employed and says that she spends half of her time in the studio working on her pieces and half the time talking to curators and exhibitionists to get her work displayed and seen and other artists for guidance. She mention that her style of work has largely been using the media of pencil and paper as opposed to computers and that she did do mostly sculpture when she was studying fine art however over the years found that the media she loved the most was just pencil and paper and so this was what she was most passionate and true about when she was creating work.

She spoke about how she has a studio in the islington mill in salford which has been good for her as it has a huge artistic community, and so is a good breeding ground for inspiration and potential collaboration. She said that the community is not all just illustrators there are graphic designers and photographers etc and so there is a really good mix of art its that she is surrounded by. This could be something i could consider if i was going into freelance work as having a studio to go to motivates you more to actually get work done as opposed to working from home and then puting it off a lot and then the fact that you would be surrounded by other artists is a good foot in swell within the creative industry (collaborations etc) and could broader the circle of potential clients and job opportunities etc.

She said it is important to have a personal space for her to work in that she can plaster with her other pieces of work and her inspirations so that she is surrounded by inspiration and motivation to work permanently. This is something that i have found helps with my work as when i am conscious about passing through my environment i find things all the time that actually inspire the project i am working on and to help me things of things to add, just in my day to day life.

She also mentioned how whenever she had chance to she would immerse herself in her work which i think is a good point to keep in mind as she mentioned how when she was working her part time job in the cinema she would draw on cinema tickets little doodles etc whenever she had chance to and then she would take these home and evolve them by spending more time on a drawing that was inspired by these quick small doodles.

She said that her style of work is defined more as fine art as she likes to show a fragment of a narrative, but that is it and the rest is left for the audience to fill in the gaps. Her main style of work she does not include a background and so the viewer is left with just a  rather surreal images of various characters doing often quite bazaar or intriguing things and then that is all the viewer can take from it. A fragment of a situation, a small section of the larger story but still so intriguing is that small piece of information that there is lots of room left for the imagination to wonder from it.

she says that her work shows beauty swell a sadistic nature and is often playful but also sinister, so shows a very mixed range of emotions present in her work making it strong and appealing, and each of these emotions kind of balance each other out. 

In 2009 - 2011 her work started to get more professional as she was working with gallerists who do all the job searching for her and so this gave her more time to focus on creating pieces and not worrying about find places to exhibit her work. And the gallerist who specialises in this job was able to find her much more work than she would on her own. So her career started to take off. 

This shows the balance between doing things yourself and hiring others to help even the work load for you as within the motion design industry many designers often will hire freelancers to help with a project with various aspects of the project be it storyboards to show a client or even to help with parts of the animation itself. 

She spoke about the positive outcomes she experienced from paying to attend an artists residency in Germany in a beautiful mountain environment. She said that environment she stayed in was set up so that you would meet the other artists staying there and that because it was out of the way and in a beautiful landscape it was a very inspiring place to develop new ideas and pieces of work within.  She said whilst she was here she started to push herself with regards t her style of working and her comfort zone and started to make pieces that showed a bit more narrative than she usually does and created scenes of animals within an environment with numerous characters so that the fragmentation narrative that she usually shows became lots of fragments together meaning that the story of her work was building. 

This was one of the pieces she made while in the residency:

and more of an in depth narrative can be seen is this piece swell with regards to how the canvases are placed together and how all the characters interact with each other and the environment that has been drawn around the characters. 

This piece was inspired by looking out into the scenery that the residency was surrounded by and she was imagining the inhabitants of the area. 

after this piece she started breaking her own personal rules more and breaking boundaries within her style as she started experimenting with using backgrounds more but trying to make the narrative more elusive like she used to in her work. This is something i should push myself to do within my own work swell as staying in the comfort zone can make artists lazy or not allow them to truly discover their creative potential. 

She then  went on to talk about the animation she has incorporated into her practise. She said that this has become an important part of her work swell since she started doing this as she makes looping gif animations of her drawings and she says that it is like a fragment of an event or motion narrative locked in time forever. 

One of her animations examples:

 
Hypnotist (Octopus) 2013 from Rachel Goodyear on Vimeo.

She said that with her animations she played with the idea of layering things up and it made her think more about how she displayed her work and making installations instead of just hanging frames up on a wall. She used projections of her animations onto still drawings to college work together.
I should also consider how to display my own work for my final exhibition and could also look into using projector and even collaging pieces of my own work in unique ways that engage an audience instead of just having a video on a screen hanging on a wall.

Another piece of inspiring advice she gave in her talk was that sometimes it can be very difficult to make yourself come up with an idea and that as an artist there is pressure to make yourself do this sometimes. She said ways to help with creative block can be to walk away and then come back to the work later after you have cleared your mind or to just doodle absent mindedly and try and create something from that but also to immerse yourself with inspirations such as other artists work. Or even just writing something quickly without thinking and making something based on that, she also said that she keeps a dream book that she always writes in and refferes to as inspiration every now and then.

To stay focused and motivated within the creative industry she says that an artists does also need to keep a sense of playfulness about their work and to not worry about making mistakes every now and then and letting some of their work not look so perfect all the time, as these mistakes can push yourself to new boundaries and let you learn from your journey as the work style progresses or goes back to an older style etc. (just going through the motions will not be the most powerful work you will make and this will be present within the work you make, passionate work radiates the passion that was put into it).

Some of her most recent work showing how the work has progressed and changed, you can she how she has used college techniques and background presence but still retains that fragmented narrative style: