Roger Jarvis

Roger Jarvis: Visual Artist and recently completed Dada-Exchange

Working with Dada-South, and in particular my involvement with the Dada-Exchange mentoring programme, has paid off significantly in helping me to identify key issues to focus upon in my practice.  The most important issue raised, seems to be the subject of looking, or conscious seeing.  I am a landscape painter, also working in Still Life, and have been exploring other possibilities alongside this.  It re-emerges in different, subtle ways, and it appears that there are two possible ways of viewing my work at the moment.  One is that I need to hone down a specific area of specialist interest.  The other is that I am a multi-faceted artist with many repressed ideas that need to be brought out into the open and realised.  Whatever the case, there is an uneasy and restless energy behind anything I do.  I enjoy all of it, but can never rest on one way of working over great duration.  The excitement and enthusiasm always seems to be about breaching my comfort zones.  But there is that restlessness I am still trying to understand.  And this is the reason I have approached Dada, to begin to develop my self awareness on a deeper level. 

One of the key points raised during the mentoring sessions, is that everything that inspires me has a point of origin - I am surrounded by it, I live in it. 

Having Autism means that, until fairly recently, I've always been quite an introverted person, and this also seems to be reflected in the way I approach my work.  However, I do feel a sense that what I produce is in some way influenced by things I have seen, and I'm interested in making it part of my practice now to pay much closer attention to what I am effected by visually.  It's a bit like learning to be my own detective.  The point is painting didn't come to me out of thin air!  For everything that I am today, there was an encounter in the past that sparked off a necessary chain of events.

Having been in education continuously over a good length of time, it's always been difficult for me to appreciate the value of research on a personal and independent level.  Especially as I've always associated it with a compulsory academic requirement.  It's been a real problem for me to get my head around how exactly it might be directly helpful to me, despite it being clearly explained often.  Although this also highlights that there's no substitute for the realisation that comes with direct personal experience.  But this is what I am dealing with now, and I'm at the point of beginning to see that the more I look, the more I can see, and the more rich my ideas can become.  Research is no longer something I am psychologically doing to satisfy somebody else; it's now about me finding myself in things - for myself.  There's a little bit of me in everything I react to and engage with.  It's this awareness that I'm working at opening up, like a bud that needs to burst into bloom. 

This is one of the most important processes that participating in the Dada Exchange helped to initiate.  It reminds me of the importance of communication, the exchange and influence of words playing a vital role in the way things are seen.  As an emerging artist, "looking" is at least half of everything I do.  And perhaps the most astonishing possibility I am coming to terms with, is that I have always done this naturally.  I've just never been very conscious of it before.  So that's my latest adventure right now - to make it more conscious, bring it out, and discover what lies yet unrevealed...

Roger Jarvis BA (Hons) Fine Art

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