Will Hill

While I’ve been professionally involved in art and design for over 50 years both as a practitioner and a teacher, presenting my own practice through the format of a blog is quite new to me, and I still prefer to think of it as a studio journal. I’m hoping that as well as providing readers with some useful perspectives on my work, organising my own observations in this form will provide me with further insights on my own practice.

This may also channel my tendency to over-explain, that can otherwise compromise the intuitive aspects of the creative process. More on this later

I’m finding that having the time for sustained but open-ended work, allows for a different kind of reflective practice than was possible when borrowing time from the demands of an academic post or, before that, the pressures of making a living through freelance commissions. In short, more time to think and wonder.

I’m finding that making small autonomous works that do not have a pre-existing purpose, involves a realignment of values and priorities. Concerns that had seemed marginal become fundamental, and artists whose work seemed at best peripheral to my interests, prove to be much more central than I’d thought. Though I’m not an art historian, I’m reasonably informed about certain areas of 20^th century fine art, and will be writing about their significance for my own work.

Letterforms and typography have been a central preoccupation of mine over the past 30 years and can be expected it play a part in the work ahead, but the nature of that relationship is yet to be seen…