Still maybe unfinished or should it be incomplete? I decided to make ‘marks’ on this referring back to stuff from the past, little echoes of Abstract Expressionism. I told myself that I would follow my inclinations, do what I felt I would do and if it turned out to be a nice piece of visual pot-pourri, or even some of that Garden Centre scented woodchip and dead flowers stuff in a wooden bowl then so be it. Placing ‘marks’ on a surface is just a compositional exercise – that the marks have ‘meaning’ is unavoidable, some describable, others, perhaps the most powerful, just beyond the reach of words. Meaning in marks maybe relies too much upon a conventional sense of literal meaning, whereas the visual is to do with the a kind of gravitational attraction. It is too a function of personality to be concerned about such issues. As with the hypochondriac, the fear of some chronic artistic disease may be debilitating in itself. Monkey-typerwriter syndrome is a worry. ‘I do this and then I do this and this dribbles down here and produces this effect.’ Amongst all the monkeys with all the typewriters, some of us will develop a disposition for certain keys and rhythms, and do nice things.
The experience of the nice is like experience in general, ordered in our schemes of things by the processes of taste. Reading a work and experiencing it are neither the same thing nor mutually exclusive. I went to the Towner recently (New Eyes, work from the Towner collection curated by six artists from Bluemonkeynet ) and was shocked by my experience of some of the work- colour field stuff , John Hoyland and others whose names of course escape me just as I need them. A sense of relief to just be there with it, stuff of the ‘my six year old could do that’ kind. How lovely to be such a six-year-old. Perhaps it is a matter of choosing your guns and sticking to them? But which gun? Some of this one is nice.
