Art History: Technical Art History, Making & Meaning [MLitt] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Most days at the hardware shop where I work, someone hands me a flake of paint picked off a skirting board and asks for 'this, but a full tin'. The spectrophotometer gives me a formula in seconds, but it is often wrong in ways customers notice immediately. A glossy chip reads differently from a matt one, an old oil-based finish has yellowed in a way the machine cannot predict, and a colour that matches under the shop's lights looks greener at home. Two years behind that counter have made me attentive to the gap between what a surface is made of and what it looks like. That gap is what I want to study.

My undergraduate dissertation examined painted timber ceilings in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scottish houses. I began with a fairly conventional question about the sources of their emblems and grotesque ornament, using printed pattern books as comparisons. As I worked through the published conservation reports for several ceilings, I found that the most persuasive evidence about how they were designed came from technical observations rather than iconography. Notes on pounced transfer lines suggested that some designs were repeated using patterns, while others had been laid in freehand. Comments on distemper binders and later overpainting showed how much of what visitors see today belongs to restoration campaigns. I could only read this material second-hand, and I was careful in the dissertation to separate what conservators had demonstrated from what I was inferring. That limitation is the main reason I am applying. I want to learn how such evidence is produced, how far it can be trusted, and how to bring it into an art historical argument without overstating it.

Alongside my degree I started painting in egg tempera, following Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte. Preparing gesso on a small panel, grinding pigments into yolk and building up flesh tones over green earth taught me more about early Italian painting than any slide lecture had. I understood why tempera is laid down in hatched strokes rather than blended, and why Cennini spends so long on preparation. My panels are not accomplished, but making them changed what I look for in a gallery. I now notice the direction of brushwork, the edges where gilding meets paint, and the places where a ground shows through. I do not mistake this for professional reconstruction, but it has given me practical questions to bring to technical study.

The paint counter has also taught me things that are useful beyond colour. I explain the differences between binders, sheens and primers to people with no interest in chemistry, and I have learned to say when I do not know whether a product will behave as they hope. Work on Saturdays is busy and exact: a mis-tinted tin cannot be sold. I have become methodical about recording formulas and checking my own work, habits I expect to rely on when keeping notes on objects and materials.

Outside work I play fiddle in a ceilidh band that does weddings and village halls. It has little to do with art history, though rehearsing the same set until it holds together under pressure is a fair preparation for sustained study.

In postgraduate study I hope to develop a grounding in the analytical methods used to examine paintings and decorated surfaces, alongside the historical sources that describe workshop practice. I am especially interested in decorative and architectural painting, which is often treated as craft rather than art and is therefore less fully studied. I would like to test whether the questions I began asking about Scottish ceilings can be answered more rigorously, and to learn to work confidently between the documentary record and the material object.