Flight: Drawing Interpretations.

Presentation by Siobhan Glynn

11/06/12

Essay Proposal

The National Gallery Project

I will begin by talking a bit about what I do.  Currently I am studying on the History and Cultural Studies of Fashion MA. 

I will explain what I did before this MA as it might explain the reasoning behind my choice of topic for this project.  Before undertaking this MA I spent nearly two years working for a London Based Fashion Designer.  This is where my interest in the fashion practitioner began.

Agnes Treplin: Can I ask you, did you study fashion design?

Siobhan Glynn: Yes, I did fashion design as an undergraduate.

As a practitioner myself I have also worked in costume production for an artist.

Presently I am working on my dissertation and I plan to share ideas from my MA dissertation and bring them into this project.  My dissertation is called Creating a Process – an investigation into the creative processes of a fashion design team.  This idea was drawn from my experience working in the fashion industry.  Noting the skill of the practitioner I decided to direct more academic focus on their talents. 

The jumping off point for my essay is looking at the theory of creativity.  You cannot really say what creativity is or isn’t but I am going to use this investigation as a discussion.  I plan to outline what creativity is and to look at hard and soft creative skills.  Hard skills would be the practical skills and the soft skills would be the inspiration, intuition, genius.  I have found that there is much written on the fashion designer but not much written about their team. 

For this project, one idea is to look at a painting from the National Gallery, for example Colin Wiggins (Special Projects Curator, National Gallery) talked to us about one of van Dyck paintings ‘Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs’ – van Dyck is the named artist but there were many different artists contributing to this painting.  For example one person did the grapes, and another, the hair etc.  When we are considering the talent of this painting are we looking at the technical skills of the individuals or on a whole the artist’s idea, or both?

‘Drunken Silenus supported by Satyrs’, Attributed to Anthony van Dyck, (c. 1620)

The National Gallery, London, Room 31

Courtesy of The National Gallery, London

Charlotte Hodes:  Have you touched on how practitioners in this project might serve your purpose?

Siobhan Glynn: As well as using a picture from the National Gallery I plan to look at the work of some of the practitioners of this project as I will be looking at their creative processes.  But my ideas are still in early stages so I am still trying to formulated are more defined plan.