SIXTH MONDAY
Halfway through… to what?
I am through to that place of flatness again, have begun working with the ideas and some may well work, but the buzz has quietened to a hum. But I remember that I like hums.
I collect ten leaves from the town and take ten pebbles from the beach. The sea is marvellous, grey with white tops and full of life.
Life seems to be the theme for this residency.
Book of the week: Art and Fear – Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland was written in 1993.
On page 1 they write: ‘making art is difficult‘. On page 2 they advise: ‘making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself,’ and on page 10: ‘art is all about starting again’ This chimes with my experience as I struggle with the ideas and how to bend them, make them speak.
For me the first stage of making art is about pushing from the comfortable known into the uncomfortable unknown, harder than it sounds. I have to push, shove, wheedle (in dictionary it says this term may be from the German wedeln to wag one’s tail), trick and bribe myself to move outside my usual channels. But when I do, I have a warm feeling inside like a woolly jumper in my stomach. Is this the same for others I wonder?
The second stage is finding a way to look sideways at something, so that it opens or widens my eyes. That’s the kind of art I like to see too.
