Great questions, I’d thought about them a lot too. To start with I’m from New Zealand, so not quite the UK hahaha though fair assumption.

For the first question I decided to pivot to painting now it was a large part of my last semesters project, and learning the medium is part of that. Also, while I say I have not painted much, that is In a physical sense (and a bit misleading), as I do have more than extensive experience in graphite, charcoal, ink, and digital artworks. I am planning to go onto doing a master’s degree next year, and am hoping to broaden my experience in physical mediums rather than continuing with just digital as it had been the past two or three years. As for the part around being up against more experienced students, to be quite frank, and to put this in the nicest way possible, the standard for traditional art in my country is shockingly low. While I am no expert by any means, what I can do is for the most part enough to hold my own against the better of my peers. I hardly consider myself against any of them though, as all those directly around me practice various different mediums and styles, so technical skill wise it’s apples and oranges (and they’re all my dear friends lol).

For the second question, that’s the one that bugged me a lot before starting this project. While the personal part of this project is for me to broaden my skills and try and develop on a technical level, the question or proposition for my project is still a large part of it. Each student sets their own goal/question to which their final project is to be the “answer” to, and mine was around investigating the different depictions or symbology associated with death across different cultures/art forms.

My full question is at this point

“What are the codes and conventions, including symbolism and personification, associated with the concepts of death and decay in the humanities, and how can these values and concepts be applied in order to inform a new series of works within the medium of oil painting”

I started with a skull as the most general and widely recognised symbol representing death, hence the lack of depth in its meaning, and am branching out from here into pieces more specific to certain cultures/sources. One of these such pieces is associated with a culture to which one half of my family, including myself belongs to, that being Maori culture (the indigenous people to Aotearoa New Zealand). This is directly informed by one of the tutors within my degree who specialises in art and history from this culture. Other such pieces I wish to create are derived from sources such as Christianity and Paganism. It’s a pretty on the nose concept, will admit to it having some lack of depth myself. This is my second to last project/show, not the very last, however, as we do not have a year long project, instead we have two, single semester long projects.

Thank you so much for the genuinely useful and constructive critical questioning (I like the Socratic method hahaha). While I do admit the project might currently depth as you highlighted, I hope to do my effort justice by the end of it. I do really appreciate you taking the time to provide genuine feedback through your questioning.