A couple of days in, and the excitement and anticipation is quickly buried under a layer of an anxious sense of vulnerability and raw exposure.
My priority this first week is to leave aside all thoughts of underlying conceptual concerns and just focus on the materials and the human form. And as soon as I decide this, I’m seized by a need to retreat to non-objective work. My safety zone of the last 8 months. I don’t, of course, go back there. Whilst this residency is about instinct and intuition, I recognise a tendency to confuse habit with instinct.
I’m plagued too by the need to rationalise and justify painting the human form in a contemporary art practice today. In one sense, the exploration of humanity through the figure is such a universal and timeless artistic preoccupation that it shouldn’t be necessary. But I need my own personal justification.
And then there are the innumerable clichés and traps of figure painting which I’ve conveniently partly sidestepped in recent years but which are unavoidable now.
Hence the anxious vulnerability as I stand in my vast new workspace and survey the bitty random pieces of work marking my settling in.
