A Walk With Cosmo.

I dont have much to say but here are some dog walk drawings.

We got sort of half lost on today’s walk. We walked through corn fields with hay bales in for a while, needed a bit of guess work, but never really that lost. I dont think Cosmo knew we were lost he was very exuberent.

Sometimes I try to test him to see if he knows the way? Oh..he makes out he does, boldly goes off in one direction. But then coincidentally discovers the trail of a squirell or rabbit which takes him on a long wide arc back to the junction where I let him decide which way. At this point he waits for me to either carry along the path he chose, or go back to the junction and pick a fresh one.

Now I noticed a blue flower in my wild flower bucket yesterday, turns out it is a corn flower. An endangered spieces. Named so because it’s habitat is corn fields. But with modern farming techniques these ‘weeds’ are eradicated with chemicals, pesticides and stuff.

This is the first flower I have ever really grown. I have told other people to plant flowers and that, but I never really bonded with those flowers.

I turned the mural job down. It was a long drive at the start and end of each working day. They were not going to include any expences outside the fee. I just thought I dont need to work that hard.

I have had my foot right hard down on the gas pedal for what seems 18 months or more even. You cant keep that pace up indefinately? I still have stuff to do but just with more time inbetween them.

Now, Cosmo has no problem with leisure and active time. He chills out during the day and makes the most of his active walk time.

I’m finding it hard to relax in the spare time. I should be reading, drawing, relaxing and reflecting on things. Reviewing my promotional material and approach, enjoying not working so hard.

But there is a little nagging feeling says ‘you should be earning money, there’s a recession on. You should ern all you can, you berk.

I think I’m punch drunk if you know what I mean! I am taking my lead from Cosmo and making an effort to chill out for fecks sake.

So here are a couple of drawings from todays Walk with Cosmo.

I’ve been feeling pants lately. I should’nt. I’ve got more work than I can keep up with and several oppotunities which look worth applying for. But I still feel rubbish, but did have a break through today. Drawings: my drawings are usually about, designing something to be made in a different material, showing some one else an idea or how to make something.

Todays drawings I did two of those three things, but I was creating little worlds that I inhabited and walked around as if I were inside a model world.

The other thing I wanted to say was someone actually contacted me to paint a mural, did you hear that PAINT a MURAL. Not print something digital onto sheet materials, paint. Brushes favoured over spray cans.

The economics of painting a mural are problematic because you have to go there and do it day after day racking up pertol and labour costs. Is it really true a painting is viable in todays digital high speed world, does it have something other media dont have, thats worth paying for.

Painting, that is where it all started for me years back and I love it. Enough to work with teenagers and a site hoarding bloody miles away. Well we’ll see?

Cosmo is a little too hot in this weather and he’s booked in for a hair cut next Tue.

The Bird man of Alcatraz shows Bert Lancaster is a ‘lifer’ who gets up every day to tend his collection of birds; he feeds and nurtures them lovingly. He cures their illnesses and becomes an expert on them.

In a way I see this is a romantic parallel to the expected life of an artist with a ‘true practice’!

My wife says that my life as an artist has been more like the Great Escape. I have worked to commissioners briefs, tried to define my practice and jumped through more hoops than you can shake a stick at. But still working inside the defined parameters of the brief I have explored a huge range of areas of interest to me. I have emptied many many hidden bags of soil into the commissioner’s plans and schemes without them knowing, right under their noses.

These bags of soil from the hidden escape tunnel of my artistic ideas and values have been distributed all over the country. I have explored and researched new mediums, new materials, new subjects, colour schemes, ways of working and topics I’m really interested in, just the same as non commissioned artist investigations. The difference might be I have had to wait some time for the opportunity to follow on with a subject which had formed part of an earlier work. Over a period of years and years revisiting certain ideas or techniques builds a body of work in that area. If you have lots of these little ideas following their own pathways simultaneously then you are always ‘finding yourself’ as an artist even though you are working to a specific brief. My training as an artist taught me to follow ideas in a straight line. My working life post education has taught me to meander, wait, work with other people’s ideas, work with things you never expected you would ever think of and work quicker than perhaps you want to.

The constant pressure to define my practice is intimidating and the use of language used by those who want to potentialy work with me or know more about me is creative, but it does not make me feel confident or able to talk back and allow me to sound like I know what I am talking about. I am sure me and many artists want to work as artists within commerce, education, local government, services and industry. Are artists expected to converse in the same language, and if they can’t, is their work rubbish? I feel intimidated by this and worry that if my letter of application or my expression of interest doesn’t use their language or their kind of visioning, if my ideas are not razor sharp and clearly described to reveal some kind of Blofeldian master plan, that I must be below the standard they are looking for.

Perhaps if I could describe that I didn’t have a deliverable concept yet, in a clever enough way that would be good enough and they would take me seriously.