Project Proposal 1.0 / 06.10.2021
It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life for me
And I'm feeling good (?)
Post-cancer and post-career as an academic, illustrator and writer, I am discovering what a new life can be...
Diagnosed with throat cancer September 2020 and following an operation, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hospitalisation in February 2021 (and redundancy at the same time), I am now forging a new life.
Free from cancer, free from work commitments and free from London I am now focussed on my new practice as an artist.
What on earth could go wrong…?
Health and Wellbeing
Death
Identity
Art Practice and Design Practice
Family and Fatherhood
Cancer Art
Having practiced professionally as an illustrator for over 30 years (see https://zeegen.me/practice ) I have a body of work and a client list that spans national and international newspapers, magazines, design companies and advertising agencies.
My work employs clip art, signs, symbols and graphic devices combined to create images that communicate new meanings.
My art practice, whilst continuing to explore and extend the graphic aesthetic of my commercial practice, is now created solely in response to self-set and self-directed lines of enquiry.
A brief period of research into art inspired by or in response to cancer has demonstrated how wide the parameters are between the clichéd work of amateur and untrained artists through to the ‘soul baring’ recent works by Tracey Emin following her intensive treatment for cancer.
Treading a fine line between cliché / pastiche and self-therapy I intend to investigate the space where the actual and the factual meets meaning and the meaningful.
Returning to the medium of screen-print, following a thirty+ year gap, brings new opportunities to create works in the real world, having spent much of my career creating artwork in the digital realm (existing in print only when published by the commissioning newspaper or magazines).
The presentation of all supporting work and final works online will enable the dissemination of my creative process through a combination of high-tech, low-tech and no-tech approaches.
I am motivated to have my work shown in the gallery context. I am also interested in reaching online audiences.
I have been invited to be a keynote speaker at an international illustration conference in Porto, Portugal in October and will be presenting on my transition from illustrator to artist.
I have also been asked to contribute to an exhibition entitled Illustration as Social Commentary as part of the Design Principles and Practices conference at the University of Newcastle in Australia in January 2022 and will be submitting work created as part of this project proposal.
F**K You Cancer / Deborah James / Vermilion
Not the Last Goodbye / Dr David Servan-Schreiber / Macmillan
Illness as Many Narratives / Stella Bolaki / Edinburgh University PressI
llness as Metaphor / Susan Sontag / Penguin Modern Classics
Some of my influences are represented here - https://zeegen.me/influences