So, where to begin? It has been a long time time since my last post…a very long time. Happily I have not been at a total standstill practice wise…in fact I have been pretty busy over the last few months (although I did have a self inflicted period of inactivity of around six months due to prior commitments before this).
To anyone that has ever read my blog on a regular basis in the past will know that I often slip away into rambling tangents and I do not think this will buck the trend – and in fact as I am writing this I am beginning to feel better about being back exploring thoughts and ideas through writing so please expect more random cascades of written thought.
Anyway now that the awkward intro is out of the way and my tail is not between my legs any longer I will begin to grind off the rust and begin musing and recording my activities once again. Lucky you!
I have been working on a fairly wide range of work and exploring new ideas – albeit along the same lines of enquiry and feel in the last few weeks my practice and ambition has grown in terms of life choices and scope of future works/ plans. Along with new works I have also begun to wrestle once again with some old foes that have been slow burning and inhabiting the inner recesses off my plan chest. I like to do this as I think it is important to follow through with large projects that represent a huge investment in time – even if it is on an ad hoc basis stealing time to work on it around smaller, faster moving projects.
Now at the age of 42 I have been constantly considering and re-considering my life and career choices for quite sometime – perhaps being brutally honest not having the courage to follow my convictions through and leaving a place of relative financial security, however, now I find myself at the precipice of some huge life changes where my drawing is concerned and the position it currently resides in within my life, it may not happen just yet but I am being uncontrollably pulled towards a life less materialistic yet more fulfilling, I think I know that deep down these financial worries wouldn’t be as severe as I frighten myself into thinking and realistically I would be working part time to earn a subsistence wage built around my studio practice. I am lucky in the fact I have a very supportive wife who will almost certainly eventually push me to make the jump into committing – at the very least part time into making drawings and carving another career (one thing is that I do not consider this so much and coldly acareer but more as a life choice), I guess my main problem in trying to accomplish this is total and utter lack of network/ contacts and friends within the artworld – and the fairly daunting thought that I do not have the faintest idea how to develop this? Social media I guess is an obvious one but how does one go about changing a few clicks into into tangible contacts? I really have not got a clue? Any advice on the off chance someone gets this far in the post would be greatly appreciated.
Mid life crisis…I don’t think so…maybe…who knows? Who cares? One thing I do know is I think I owe it to myself to try and integrate my work into my working (and wider) life I am always brimming with ideas but all too often they die in a sketchbook, strangled by crushing lack of time. More than a mid life crisis I feel I have earned the chance to see what happens…so watch this space.
I have toyed with the idea of starting to use oil paint as well as drawing with ink to expand the aesthetic scope of my work. I am in the final stages of completing a random commission for a skateboard collector who wanted a piece of my work but something that could hang with his other boards – totally out of my remit but I have hugely enjoyed doing it, this has been painted and I think it has whet my appetite to explore other mediums and substrates.
Images will follow in the next couple of days of the work I have been producing in the last couple of months.
as has always been the case thank you for reading and whatever you do keep working.
