becca hyman

Just signed the petition at http://www.savethearts.org.uk. Although the 25% cuts to the arts is kind of like having a chainsaw shoved up your rear end, this is what artists are good at, right? Dealing with adversity. It just means we’re gonna have to be a lot more resourceful. There could be this like amazing new wave of artwork being generated from this bullshit.

see shrigley’s animation on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6rYDaORe3k&feature=player_embedded

I made this for a friend who had her interview for Oxford. I was thinking, I should make a good luck card, but nahhh that’s too cliché and I should use my artistic genius to come up with something even more brilliant. Then I was like, imagine if you could give and receive Good Luck gift cards/debit cards. Like, you’d put three months Good Luck on it or something, and they’d go to an ATM machine and it would ask ‘how much luck would you like to take out today? w/ receipt’ and you’d select like an hour’s worth of good luck and you’d go to a job interview and they’d love you and hire you and just as you were leaving their office the hour would run out and you’d trip over your own feet but it wouldn’t matter ‘CAUSE YOU JUST GOT THE JOB HELL YEAH.  
There’d be age-restrictions on them. So only on 16+ Good Luck Cards could you use the Good Luck to get laid or something because, you guys, you should totally stay abstinent unless you wanna be on Underage and Pregnant.

Within the art specialism of visual communication, we’ve been separated into ‘graphic designers’ and ‘illustrator/animators’ like a great big media apartheid. Having asked what distinguishes the two pathways, we were told it’s the way in which we think and the process with which we reach a final piece of work. Oh, that clears that up then. Except, that very day, an Illustrator stroke Graphic Designer came in to give us a lecture, which we assumed was about her work and how she was a great big art contradiction, but she came to talk to us about the letter X instead.

The lecture was actually weirdly interesting. My favourite new tit bit of irrelevent information was that X as a symbol of affection, i.e. a kiss, originated from illiteracy. Way back when, possibly in Italy or France, I forgot, people who couldn’t spell their own name would sign formal documents with an X, and in order for the document to be legal you were required to kiss your signature. The legality part of it fell out of practice possibly because people realised how utterly ridiculous it was, and the whole X as a kiss just became associated with each other. She also talked about X as a symbol of anonymity, negativity, approval, danger, politics and just about anything. Its role within typography, nature, composition.

As X is so multifaceted, she asked us to try to come up with a single human identity for the curious case of X. I wrote that X would be a person with their arms and legs perpetually spread out, they’d probably be easy, their name would be professor X, and you’d spend hours trying to find them. Google Cathy Gale.

I’m also having a heart attack about where to apply for BA. The lines have been blurred between graphics, illustration, animation and even fine art now that I don’t even know what I’m choosing any more. JUST SOMEONE HIRE ME WHEN I LEAVE UNI. Pay me lots and lots of money to do what I want.