Free Jazz Reflection

My previous project was to create a series of images on five artists integral to free jazz/avant-garde jazz: Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler.

I explored the artists music and lives and began to understand how their music was a direct response to their environment; and in that sense my images became a response to my own experience of their music, almost like a 3rd person perspective. The abstract drawings and patterns are free drawings and experimentations I completed whilst listening to the music, but are also responses to their city, New York. Perhaps its a map of the subway, the Brooklyn bridge or a towering structure: each pattern has a place.

To reflect the spontaneity and freedom of the music, I felt it right that each image should have no specific orientation and I resolved this by constructing the images into a book, with each image being a double page spread. In that way they can be enjoyed no matter how you approached the book, and to enforce that approach, the book had no clear front or back cover, nor an indication of whether it was upside down or not.

It was possibly the first project at university that I felt completely in sync with and for want of a better word t just seemed to sustain a constant fluidity. I have always felt engaged with what I create but I could feel momentum building and this project was where I could really see myself pushing through to the next level. Everything before was part of the journey and i regret none of my decisions because each success and failure was the mechanics into my progression. The success of the project has not made me complacent however, it has made me crave something grander, the journey will be even more challenging and will require me to be even more precise clinical and progressive but that risk and challenge drives me on, I will not lose my momentum.

The final images from Free Jazz

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Hello my name is Nate Kitch, I’m an artist/illustrator. 

Ive always found drawing a somewhat strange idea, I have always loved doing it, but perhaps have fallen short in the sense or really re-capturing something in a photorealistic way. I always seemed to struggle with scale and proportion and I suppose that lead me to seek new ways of image making. My art foundation challenged me to look at the way I interpreted and made my art; to then completely demolish and then reconstruct it, in a new refreshing manner, that helped me to think in somewhat less obvious ways. I have always held how I see the world as an important factor of who I am, It’s important to question things and maybe sometimes risk being seen as a bit eccentric, and as an artist, surly to seem usual   would be a bad thing? I like taking photographs, not of family events or meetings with friends but of things that excite me, the fog on an early morning with the aerials penetrating through, the empty table in a cafe, power lines dissecting the skies or the the elbow of a love one. I take photos wherever I go not just to keep as memories but as images in themselves that can be seen and inspire me time after time or even be adapted and used in my work, they are so quickly and easily taken with the click of a button but their use afterwards is indefinite.

Aswell as my photographs I try to surround myself with things that inspire me, postcards, cut-outs from magazines, web pages such as:

  http://butdoesitfloat.com/ 

http://triangletriangle.com/

http://www.yellowbluebus.co.uk/      (a few of many many examples)

I think websites are great as they are something that constantly updates and shifts and in some respect it forces you to do so; to adapt and change and not sit on your laurels stagnating like a dirty flannel. I often buy books, journals and magazines too, as these are as well a great resource in terms of inspirations, they can always spark that new idea.

When i create drawings there is rarely a set idea or goal; I prefer to just take what I have around me and start moving the pen onto paper. I let the object around me begin to construct how my drawing will take place. For example perhaps I decide to use a protractor, a rule a red pen and some squared math paper to construct my draeing. I will just being to create with these mediums and tools and just expand from there. A lot of the time  will also create rules for myself and then stick to these rules to encourage the progression of the drawing. I may tell my self the I draw horizontally in black and vertically in red, or perhaps i will join each point where lines i dissect with a graphite pencil. Each time the rule can be different but I am rigorous with its application during the drawing process and will not allow the rule to be broken, often re-stsrting drawings many times until they are completed.

I dont know if the way I draw easy a lot about me, I guess it reveals that I am a person who likes things in a certain order; I don't want things to just pop up last minute and not have gone through a certain degree of planing. It's not to say i'm a rigid individual but i would say I  am a man of habits and having things the way I like them, but of course am I reading too much into things?