The title of my Final Major Project (FMP) is ‘Free Will and Determinism’ (FW&D) and is both a study of arguments within the philosophy of FW&D and an attempt to develop a mode of practicing art which engages with philosophical subjects.
As a part-time student, I had finished all my work on previous projects by the summer of 2019. I then began what was going to be a ‘mock’ FMP on FW&D as a practice run but the time spent on the initial investigative work and other commitments meant that it turned into my actual FMP.
I cannot go on to do a degree course so my goal on the project was always to work with a variety of techniques and media through the development stage and then focus on figurative oil painting for the final works in order to launch a future practice of painting and printmaking.
My work was impacted only slightly by the Covid-19 lockdown in that I produced four final paintings instead of the planned six.
In my Statement of Intent (SoI), I stated that I would ‘examine my own approaches to fine art, as far as possible steering away from illustrating the ideas explored and, instead, engaging with them and allowing them to guide my art works’ in order to produce ‘works which explore and interrogate my own views in the debate’. However, I found more inspiration in the concepts used in the philosophy texts and learned that I could produce works which, although they might be viewed as illustrative of those concepts, were art works in their own right.
Tony Linde 