I am persevering with the speech recognition but I realise that my Belfast accent is challenging it somewhat. I have found if I want it to type correctly I need to don the persona of a BBC newsreader circa 1960.
Well Christmas is over for another year, one of the highlights were sledging under the stars on Christmas day and Boxing day with my children and crazy dog Otis, the lowlights, I managed to get my husband completely the wrong present which led to a competitive battle as to who have been more disappointed over the years (doesn’t make for family harmony).
One area he does score top marks in though is that every year he buys me an art book, (he reckons he has at least another 30 years (books) left in him). This year it was a book on drawings by Rachel Whiteread. Rachel to me looks comfortingly like an old school sculptor. Understated practical clothes and no nonsense hairdo and a love of form, space and all things solid, no Gucci suits or cross dressing frills for this artist. She lost me a little in the Turbine Hall but perhaps it was more I who had lost myself. Her drawings are beautiful in their simplicity and I feel a real affinity with her approach. Like her I tend to use materials wholly inappropriate for drawing and we share a love of varnish in places it probably shouldn’t be. As such I can’t wait to get in the studio again and unearth all those little experiments than I had undervalued.
As my own critic I suppose I am at times ludicrously harsh on myself and most of my work never sees the light of day. On that painful Saatchi tv programme one young artist said she never looked at any other artists work as she felt it would make her own work boringly predictable. Tracey Emin replied that it is precisely because you do not look at other artists’ work your work is boringly predictable. An interesting dialogue but for me seeing another artist confidently present their work gives me the courage to trust in mine. In 2011 I want to be an artist who is truthful in what I aim to produce, unshakeable in my commitment to produce it and comfortable in the direction I’m taking. I’m getting closer I think.
