I've just got back from a really good, thought provoking all-day symposium at the Regional Print Centre in Wrexham, timed to coincide with the Wrexham Print International 2009. There was a particular focus on the role of artists' blogs with Andrew Bryant from a-n and Pam Newall and Don Braisby from the Regional Print Centre. The general consensus among bloggers was that blogging can really help your practice as an artist, although it is definitely addictive and can sometimes be another layer in the woven fabric of prevarication, stopping you from actually getting down to making the work (someone suggested that "incubation" was a better word than "prevarication" in this context.) Well, anything which encourages reflection and consideration is a useful tool providing it doesn't paralyse you completely – a "good servant, but a bad master".
I've been thinking about "good" and "bad" drawing lately, and whether there's any such thing. It's difficult to define: there are so many things to take into account, so much art-historical and philosophical and post-modern baggage. An art tutor once said to me "A good drawing should look like a battlefield", but does it follow that a drawing which doesn't look like a battlefield is "not good"? Surely not. See last year's Jerwood Drawing Prize. See Raphael.
I got out my old sketchbooks to find examples of "bad" drawing for the blog: what struck me more than the quality of the work (mostly OK) was the consistency of my interests over the last forty years. Alright, more imaginative/imaginary/illustrative stuff when I was a teenager, but pages of little figures drawn from observation – some of them not too bad at all (and it's amazing how scanning them into the computer improves them!). But some nasty overpencilled landscapes done at the age of fourteen. Tut, tut.
