It’s (to me) a surprising amount of days since my last blog post. I’ve been very, very busy with art in the real world and have been ‘saving it all up’ ready to post about it.
I’ve photo-documented my journey through the month of May, and will share details of it all in the next few days.
The degree show is on 5th June, and assessments start next Monday. The end is nigh.
I am exhausted, and will be quite glad to have finished. I guess what I have learnt most during the past 3 years has been that I’m probably too ‘long in the tooth’ for all this ‘education’ malarkey. When you’ve been making art and throwing it away for 30 years, you develop a different kind of relationship with your art. Like you’re just not driven by the same motors that some others are. I suppose that I’ve always known that, and have (and will) steadfastly refuse to follow trends, methods, ‘the right way’, etc.
Art (if that’s what you have to call it) is just what I do, even if you don’t ‘get’ it, I’ll still keep doing it. As I said a while ago on this very blog – we’re all together going on very different journeys. I happen to think that if you are truly a creative person, then your journey will certainly be right for you and you shouldn’t go on someone elses. I suppose what I am saying is that, on reflection, as I suspected before I began this course – art as we know it today cannot (and shouldn’t) be taught. The only things that can be taught are the craft elements of art – techniques, materials, composition, mechanical knowledge etc.
I’m not alone in thinking that, and have noted the same being said again in the last issue of Art Monthly.
I would like to think that at some point in the future, art can separate itself from academic study, thus giving rise to unfettered creativity. I guess that art schools would be much better at that than universities – and a qualification in art perhaps ought to be more vocational. There’ll always be those that think that you need to write essays to prove that you’re an artist. I really think that’s daft. Your head is where it’s at. Where’s your head at?
Whatever transpires after uni, I remain very happy with my own art. I can also see some others around me who should be very happy with theirs too. They deserve to be.
Tomorrow (Friday) is my last day for setting-up my degree show. I am taking it all in, except for the sketchbooks & blog stuff which I need to sort out on the weekend.
My project is important to me – personal, if you like. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone down that route and instead gone for a more frivolous art – but I really needed to do this body of work. Every single part of it counts, like the pages in a book. I am often told (by lecturers) to edit my work – as if I do too much; over-complicate things; to strip it back. That isn’t what I do. I have already done that before it gets displayed and am very capable of a ‘less is more’ approach. This project just isn’t one of those times. It’s about 6 ‘souls’ and each one counts.
Apart from a last minute move of a painting whose positioning I was testing, all is as it will be.
If it isn’t much liked, then it will be entirely my fault, and that is how it should be. I can happily live with that.
I am ready to move on now. I shall drink to that next week.
