April 2009

…The Adventure So Far

Hello I’m Victoria and it’s jolly nice to meet you. I’m British and no, I don’t talk like that, but I watch far too much Family Guy not to take advantage of the wonderful stereotyping just this once!

Well what’s this all about? To be honest I’m not really sure just yet. I am looking for somewhere to offload my thoughts and ideas as apparently that’s what people do these days. I suppose I’m just looking for a record of what’s going on in my strange little world so that the little things don’t get lost and the big things know where they started from. So I’m recording my strangeness and starting a digital diary that everyone knows as a blog.

I like the thought of blogging but I’m a late starter as everyone else seems to have been doing it for years. I have never been good at writing a diary and the thought of strangers reading what’s going on in my life is rather strange, but also interesting, so I will continue. I don’t plan to reveal any secrets and I’m not planning on becoming a huge gossip but I would like there to be some point to this and so I will try to pass on some things I find interesting and helpful.

So what rock did I crawl out from under?

To get an idea of the type of person I am today I suppose it would be a good idea for me to start from the beginning so here goes.

A long, long, time ago when I was about 6 my mother asked me if I wanted a nurses outfit and accessories for Christmas and I asked her why I would want a nurses outfit? Her reply was that all young girls want a nurse’s outfit to play with for when the other toys get sick. I told her that I was going to be a doctor and that was that (I think the year before I had wanted to be the Prime Minister but I had obviously gone off the boil on that one). Anyway my mother liked this and from then on that’s the direction I took. I got the doctors outfit and went around diagnosing people, I would give them some imaginary pills to make everything go away and put the world to rights – thankfully I now have pills in the bathroom cabinet that put my world to rights, but I digress.

Luckily when I started school I wasn’t that bad at the sciences and maths and it seemed that my very early decision to work in the medical profession wasn’t out of bounds. I was always doing well in the arts too but of course at parents evening if your child is studious and is doing maths and science at the top level for the year, the arts are seen as play time rather than academic.

At school I found that I was very influenced by my teachers, if I liked them, I liked the class and generally every year my ‘favourites’ changed as my teachers did but luckily I always found the ones who taught me maths and science to be bearable and the geek inside me was amused by their strange scientific stories and ‘jokes’ if you can call them that. However, when I was in high school I was having an off day and thought it would be ever so funny to play up in art class. Obviously this got under my teachers nose and from then on we didn’t get along. She became a teacher I didn’t like, through every fault of my own, and I didn’t take art when I came to choose my GCSE subjects, so science prevailed.

My family then moved abroad a term into my GCSE’s and I had to choose new subjects that fit in with the international schools timetable. Although the sciences were safe I had to choose between French and Art. It was a dead cert that I was going to choose art because, although I hadn’t taken art academically, I was always drawing and painting at home and drawing pretty pictures seemed far more fun than learning the French alphabet. I had quite a bit to catch up on though, as I had missed some projects already, so I had to make up the time by putting in extra hours in my breaks. This didn’t apply to the other classes as they were working from the same UK curriculum. This structured art thing was all new to me – you mean that these pretty pictures have to have a point, crap!

It took me a while to settle in and I found it hard trying to work out mixing my creativity with providing the teacher what she wanted so I could get the grade. For the next term it was all a mess, I wasn’t really getting into it and although I was good at the elements of art I wasn’t producing anything grade worthy as there was no planning or thought put in just me making a creative mess. After the second term I decided to approach my art projects with the same planning as I did my science experiments. Start with a goal – what did I need to find out or address? Plan how I was going to achieve it. Detail what I was going to do to find the solution, what apparatus was I going to use, who’s previous studies were I going to use for inspiration and what was the link between these and the goal. I wrote about what I thought the outcome would be, I made sketches of what the final product should be and practiced the techniques I needed to master and achieve this goal. I then used everything I had researched to create the final piece. I continued by analysing it and deciding what was good and what could have been done better. I completed the projects by concluding whether I had achieve my goal or not and how I would use what I had learnt from the good and bad bits of this project to further the ones that followed.

I did this for my third project and it worked, I got top grades and it seemed to fit in with everything that was expected of me. I then gave up all of my breaks and lunch breaks, and even took the work home with me, to re-do the previous two projects and get them up to speed. Obviously with working backwards I had to make obvious mistakes, which I then fixed, to show some false sense of a timeline and make out I had been improving from the start. By this point I was really enjoying myself and I spent all my free time in and outside of school being creative. I started advancing my skills by going to art shops and buying materials that the school couldn’t provide and felt like I had found my niche. The good old days when I was a kid and would dash to the shops with my pocket money to buy new stationary had moved onto buying oils, paintbrushes and canvases with the same enthusiasm.

All the while math and science carried on as normal, even with a little less enthusiasm for them in comparison to my love for art, I was still hitting top grades and everyone was happy.

By the end of my GCSE’s I had achieved the first A* for art the international school had received to date and my work was put into exhibition. I began doing my A-levels at the same school but the resources available to teach this next level wasn’t really cutting the mustard and I found I was doing most of the work alone. I was invited to join art groups and sculpture groups outside of school for free and I found that everyone was keen to see what I was going to come up with but the school/college side of things weren’t working out for me.

Although art was my own personal way to vent any stress and creativity I needed to get out I had many discussions with my mother about where I should go from this point and she always reminded me of the little 6 year olds dream. I knew I had to give the sciences a go as I could always do art in my spare time after all.

So I came back to the UK (Brighton and Hove) to study. I took Human Biology, Chemistry, Maths and Psychology AS and A-Levels. I had slightly changed my focus, within the sciences when I lived abroad, after reading the Dr Kay Scarpetta novels by Patricia Cornwell and decided that I wanted to be a coroner or go into scenes of crime investigation. This was long before the CSI on TV; I wanted reality not pretty people and catchy story lines. I didn’t have much time to do any art while I was studying as I was doing evening classes while working during the days and weekends to earn money to pay the bills and put myself through college. I got the grades and made it to University and I had achieved the family goal to have one person make it to Uni.

I knew pretty much from the word go that this wasn’t for me. I didn’t enjoy University, I didn’t like the people and there was no connection with the tutors. There was no more fun and their humour had gone sour – or maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it. So after a semester of straight A’s, or the university equivalent, I quit to become an artist.

Hello my name is Victoria Boarer and, yes, I am a Uni drop out and proud of it!

Moving back slightly, I was a computer geek from very early on. I don’t really remember life before computers and with them came paint software and websites. Throughout my youth I was working on computers, creating pretty pixellated pictures and making very 90’s websites to display it on – I even had the token moving gif’s, black backgrounds and comic sans font! Those were the days, when no-one had any self respect on the internet and if it moved, flashed or made a noise then we were happy.

I left Uni and put the student loan from the first year in a savings account to be used as a deposit on a flat one day – at that point there was no cheaper way of having a loan and you don’t have to pay it back unless you’re earning loads.

I picked up my paint brushes and canvases and didn’t look back. My first lot of paintings were accepted in a gallery nearby and I was promoted as their youngest ever professional artist. My first painting sold for £200 in 20 minutes of it being put on display and that got me into the local news paper. At this time I used the name Miss Tori on my paintings. I painted over 100 pieces in 2004 and sold enough to keep me going for the first 6 months after leaving Uni. Some were sold, some donated to charity and some given as gifts to friends and family. During this time I had bigger plans of starting a community art website where local artists could display their art and I would aim to arrange events and art auctions in the local area to sell them. This started out well and we had two successful art auction events and a website to match.

After a few months I found that although my intentions were good, arranging art auctions and updating the small website wasn’t going to bring in enough money to buy a flat and so I had to get a proper job with a regular income to please the banks when I was ready to put down a deposit. From then on I only painted commissioned pieces.

I found that working on websites and graphic design in my spare time brought in some extra cash and I got a lot of work through word of mouth so I turned my focus to this and moved away from painting for a while. Over the next 2 years I built up my design skills, built up the work, saved up the money and bought a flat at 21. I worked during the day in the office, worked evenings, designing, and my weekends were spent doing the flat up from scratch. I laid the floor, fixed the damp and fitted the kitchen. During this time I had nowhere to paint as I was literally living in a work site and, unsurprisingly, wet paintings and work sites don’t mix.

Once the flat was finished I continued to work in the office and design in my spare time. Eventually, thanks to a friend of mine who happened to be head of marketing at an agency, I was pushed to my limits and provided enough work to quit my day job and design full time. For this opportunity and help I will be forever grateful – you have to be very lucky to get enough help to go it alone nowadays and finding someone willing to give up their time to carry you along while you adjust is a god send, thanks John J.

I continued working under the sole trader name I had used when I was working with the other artists, Mystery Art Group. 4 months later I formed the limited company Riot Creative ( www.riotcreative.co.uk), to give myself a little bit more credibility and I also hoped it could be used by other freelancers as a place for creative’s to work together under one company name. I was able to cover most of the work that came my way and I outsourced the rest. Everything worked out well for the next few months and all of my time was spent working, a 9am to 3am day was becoming the norm. Unfortunately not long after the limited company was formed I got glandular fever and although I pushed through and continued to work, I was ill for over a year and bed ridden for most of that time. Luckily I was still able to get the work done and had other freelancers to pick up the slack when I was at my worst.

I finally got better from the virus about 6 months ago but due to my weakened immune system I’m still getting ill far too much and I’m getting very bored of the taste of snot!

I now feel that it’s about time I got back to being creative again so let’s see where it leads.

So what am I doing now?

Obviously, over time, my thoughts and feelings towards the arts has changed. I have painted, designed graphics and websites for the past 10 years and I’ve tried to keep up with the developments on all sides throughout this time – but what interests and influences me now?

For the past 2 years I have been singing in an alternative rock band called Spitefire. I have experienced many new things over the past 4 years and my mindset and dreams have changed from that of the 21 year old I was. I have more piercings and tattoos and listen to music that is very different from what I enjoyed in my early years.

We grow from person to person and our personalities change over time. We have to adapt to these changes to stay moving forward on our never ending search for happiness and contentment. I know now that I need to put an end to the past year of illness and stress by starting a new chapter of my life with a renewed enthusiasm – I must find my creative spark again.

I have followed the tattoo scene properly for about a year now from a distance. I have always been interested in tattoos but waited to have them myself until I had reached an age where they wouldn’t been seen as a reflection of my upbringing. My mother taught me to be a good girl and in some areas of society tattoos and piercings are still frowned upon.  So I now have tattoos and piercings and am totally addicted to them both. About a year ago I felt I wanted to train to become a tattoo artist to compliment my life as a graphic and web designer but while my partner was studying I decided to keep it on the back burner until he finished his college course. That time has come.

I have been painting tattoo style artwork on the walls of the flat over the past few months and really love the new look and feel to the place. There is still a lot of wall space left and many, many, ideas to fill them. I’ve also seen some nicely painted skateboards displayed on walls and am about to paint one up with some tattoo ideas to see how that works out.

Along with all of this I am feeling the need to start painting again.

So to conclude I am an artist, a graphic designer, a singer and am about to learn the art of tattooing – I may also join the circus once I have learnt to juggle it all :p