Have I found my practice?
I am rarely consistently happy with what I do. It is possible to see it one day with a degree of satisfaction, and the next with a degree of despair. The distance of objectivity is rarely achieved and hard won when it is. There is an over-riding need to do the work. Even if it is never shown, it nevertheless is a trace of a life; Breughel’s Icarus is the model, the world around him blissfully unaware of both his soaring and his demise. I feel for Icarus and identify with the ploughman. There is an urgency created by my lack of work. By now I should have a lifetime’s worth, and there isn’t a lifetime left in which to make up for what has not been done. The sense of mild panic that this generates can fuel a creative surge or frustrate it. Specific acts of looking are for me steps in a journey that has always a question mark in view. I have to confirm my practice anew with each piece that I make, through empathy with the qualities of subject-matter and physical satisfaction in materials. It is like setting out on a tightrope whilst being uncertain that the destination is securely tied.
Uncertainty is however never resolved, but passed ahead through the making of images, in the hope of finding some kind of equilibrium – a hope that if fulfilled might mean the end of the project; more important than the solution, is the next problem. One of my lecturers many years ago said to me that he could work all day, searching apparently in vain for something, and then at the end discover that he had been finding it all the time. The artist IS the consequence of practise and reflection. There is no choice. Whether there is homogeneity or fracture in the outcome, what happens has to be confronted. That is why the business of making art is so uncertain. But the only place an artist finds him/herself is in the work. I travel hopefully.
