A New Search For Figuration

When I began this residency, I promised myself I would not overthink. I would not attempt to resolve conceptual concerns. I would remain open to possibility in everything I did. And I would only do what I wanted to do, not what I felt I ought to do. But in the first couple of days of feeling vulnerable, consumed by unhelpful vague fears of public humiliation and failure, it was easy to forget those promises, and to forget why I was here doing something I really wanted to do. I had to keep reminding myself: this is supposed to be fun! Fun without responsibility for producing any resolved work.

And I got there. It became great fun, playing without purpose, indulging in anything I fancied making. If I became fed up with a particular direction, if an experiment just didn’t resonate, I felt no stress about having to resolve the idea. I just moved on. In this way, it’s possible to generate a lot of work over five weeks.

I’d decided halfway through that I would present the work in an ongoing working studio setup. No editing, no re-presenting, no unmasking of edges. Discarded ideas propped up around the walls, the work table covered in jars of paint, medium and solvent, still full following my conversion to Dulux midway through. The larger pieces are framed not just by masking tape but by little watercolour and graphite studies and experiments.

I look around and realise everything has been generated out of my head in just five weeks. It’s gone from nothing, not existing, to a theatrically exuberant takeover of this vast space. Baroque forms in free fall, an ambition realised to paint forms entirely from memory, abstracted figuration pushed to the limits.

It’s another stepping stone on a continuing journey with blind corners every half mile. What a privilege.

Well over halfway into this residency. A daily routine is nicely established, and interesting insights emerge every day.

First, magic happens after at least five or six  hours play-work on a variety of meditative tasks (another layer of papier mâché on a life-size figure; sketchbook doodles; a series of small studies painted in rapid succession; more mind mapping). After a full day of happily pottering from mini-project to mini-project, back and forth, clocking up 10,000 daily steps without leaving the space, I start painting on a large surface with huge brushes and pots of Dulux with no idea of what will happen, but loving the process of slapping on paint rapidly without thought. Watching figures emerge. Not judging or correcting, but allowing the paint to be paint though admittedly there’s not a lot of choice with a four inch brush.

Second, allowing conceptual concerns to just be there, quite literally on the periphery of the space and my mind, and then getting on with making and not thinking, has allowed my practice concerns and processes to cristallise without brain ache. Issues which have nagged me for a long while suddenly seem clear, and my work without conscious thought reflects these concerns from inside-out, rather than the ideas driving the work outside-in. This feels right. I had not realised how much I was shoe-horning my work into my ideas.

Third, I have always known inside I am a one-stop alla prima painter. Although the work of the last year has made me realise I don’t need to overwork, and also that there’s nothing wrong with radical reiterations, I am loving starting and finishing huge surfaces in a couple of hours.  My storage issues will be worse than ever after this month, but it’s worth it to connect with my genuine inner self.

What’s special for me about working in this space in this  residency? What’s to stop me clearing out my usual studio space of all old stuff, and committing to a month of new exploration there instead?

Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of any attempt to empty my own studio, there are very real psychological and spatial challenges in moving in to a “white cube space” for a limited time. The tabula rasa feeling of that first morning was uncomfortable but ultimately an important and necessary driver in getting on with making, not thinking. Thinking and reflecting is my default mode. It’s where I go when work gets tough, to avoid confronting “failure” on an hourly basis. Failure is a glorious and productive force in artistic practice, but working to cheerfully embrace it in a new exposed environment takes some doing.

It’s taken till now to be okay with failing (interspersed by chinks of light, thankfully) in this vast white room.

The anxiety, the early discomfort, was only dealt with by not running away. For the first time in six months, I was committed to being in situ at work before 9am and not leaving until 5.30pm. Office hours. No exceptions. The usual distractions from full time studio attendance with no show deadlines in sight (vet visits, household deliveries, meter readings, dental appointments, chauffeuring family to/from the station, shopping, cooking, cleaning, tidying, blah blah bla) all fall away.

It is transformative to work office hours in a studio without a show deadline.

I’m there because I want to be there, but when I don’t, when I’ve reached impasse/block/pause, I turn and walk to another workstation, another new set of possibilities. Because there are no limits, no deadlines, nothing has to be resolved, I’m liberated to try anything, start anything, explore any path. With the space to do it.

Viewing large pieces from a distance is a joy. Spreading out a huge dust sheet to leave a mass of  tangled wire out without fear of tripping over it is a delight.

I couldn’t possibly be doing what I’m doing right now in the way I’m doing it right now in my usual space. And that’s not even touching on the important conceptual concerns and practice insights I’m getting.

So much possibility.