Arts Portfolio

Ok, a bit of a weird title. You might even say it’s pretentious or trying to be “arty”. Well I guess this is an “arty” site so I can probably get away with it, but the reality is this subject is something I have thought about and written about previously. Before I studied illustration I did a year of an animation degree in Newport, Wales. It probably wasn’t the best course for me, I had a great time but I didn’t work that hard and I don’t think the tutors liked me. I believe this because of the way they talked to me and the fact that I would sometimes get lower marks than other people even on joint projects where we did the work together.

One project in particular was a short film about four types of music. Another student and I thought up four genres of music between us, one of the genres I choose was hip-hop/rap, something I was really into at the time. I think the final film was quite good, but they questioned the fact that the hip-hop piece was about gangsters, guns and violence. I responded that this was what the music was about, but I was told it wasn’t and that not only was I typecasting but I was being racist. This is quite simply not true, I am not a racist and I am deeply apposed to racism in all of its forms.

I understood that the real reason I was being persecuted was because my tutor’s perception of me was that of a naïve teenager that was probably just listening to that sort of music because I thought it somehow made me cool by association. Well I didn’t think that, but that was their perception. It was my perception that the tutors looked down to the students as spoilt little brats that didn’t know anything about life, and they should be told this frequently. I remember another case when a student I was sure was going to get a first class honours degree was completely slated because his work was about the procreation of Adam and Eve. He suggested that possibly Eve was wearing the trousers so to speak. Well they told him that he was being prejudice to Jewish people (I am not sure how) and they even went so far as to ask him if he had “ever actually had sex with a woman” when criticising the more intimate scenes. I didn’t care for this attitude the tutors seemed to have.

After the project that I was down graded for had finished being criticised, we were given the opportunity to write a small piece as a way of justifying our work. Mine was titled “Even a blind man can tell you the sky is blue” and basically it questioned peoples perceptions. It had lots of illustrations like the one below that I used to try and get my point across subtly, without offending them:

Depending on how you perceive things, you will see the colours differently. You may in fact be using a screen reader to read this web page and can’t see the image at all. Regardless, your perception and interpretation of these colours is likely to be somehow different than my own. Perception has a much wider scope that just colour interpretation and we use what we perceive to make decisions. I was marked on this piece and needless to say I was given a bad grade.

Even though I left the course, and don’t think much of it now, I do believe I have learnt an important lesson. People’s perceptions directly affect their opinions and judgment, and this judgment again affects their opinions. It’s an endless cycle. My written piece and my little illustrations supplied with it simply reinforced my tutor’s opinion that I was an arrogant and naive little upstart, and there was nothing I could do to change that. Who knows, maybe they were right. A perception after all is an individual event and who is to say they weren’t right and I was wrong? However, I like the idea of them reading this now, and I hope just maybe they have changed the way they perceive things just a little bit.

As a little foot note, I would like to mention that the student previously mentioned that was grilled by my tutors has gone on to make a successful career in animation.