I was speaking to a visitor called Jerry or maybe Gerry on Thursday. He was saying about why he couldn’t make the launch party. It was because he had gone to see his 11 year old grand-daughter dancing at the Royal Ballet.
Sarah was eleven the youngest there..It came up about stories in the news or maybe heard on the radio that the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet had resigned this week.
http://www.app.com/article/20120126/NJENT08/301260…
We pondered this for a while, wondered how it could have come about. Gerry said he might be off to become a tattoo artist. Simon suggested that maybe he’d had enough of the pressure and just wanted a regular life. I wondered what was happening in New York. I heard on the news a while ago about strikes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/music/city-…
Gerry was here to see the exhibition and asked me where all the paintings were. There was one painting in the room. It took up the entire wall. I hadn’t painted anything. I suppose that is because I am a sculptor. I know this. But as Simon pointed out Picasso sculpted and painted and I remember seeing a body of work which was entirely composed of faces on ceramic bowls and vessels.
Maybe I am not as diverse as Picasso. I have made prints. I did a residency at Leeds College of Art and Design a few years ago where I spent 6 months in the print studio. I eventually got the hang of it. In the end I quite enjoyed it. But no painting for me as yet. Do I event have paint anymore? I definitely have a handful of brushes. I think when I lost that really nice watercolour set after Limavady I was really upset and never really got over it.
Anyway, so Gerry and the paintings. In a winding tackful way I said I was kinda over the modernist ideal and that I was in no position to present him with a masterpiece in oil or marble and that the best I could do with the resources I had was provide a platform for dialogue. Maybe something would come out of it, maybe not but that is wasn’t up to me to provide a finite.
I don’t know how this went down. I needed a break anyway because we just had created 10 Mutoscope animations in collaboration with a group of primary school kids. Well we kinda pointed them in a direction and they just ran away with it. They’d made up some crazy funny stories about Borris the mouse who stole things like pencils and bits of plastic for fun. He slept in a bed shaped like a chariot which he accessed through a hole in the floor. There was also Lost Larry, and a guy who was really tall and used this to see in peoples gardens, a flesh eating monster and a space ship that also worked in water.
The challenge for me when working with young people is not to oversimplify things. To tell it how it is but use simple words. Sometimes when trying to find the right word the idea can get a little lost so when I was taking about ‘Unnamed (System)” which was inspired by the celebrating weighing I kinda lost the plot a bit and so I just left it hanging in the air. The kids were cool about this but I felt that I could have done better with that one.
Never mind life goes on. It’s not a static object, it is just evidence of a conversation which when you try to remember it comes out differently. It’s probably better this way.
BTW Jonathan who had just come back from NYC had the lowdown on the scene there. Although 6 protesters had been arrested. It seems it was full of life in the museums and commercial galleries.
http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Sto…
