Went up to Liverpool to see the John Moores painting prize yesterday. I travelled up with my sister, who has been visiting from Australia and was doing her usual mad dash around the UK to see her many friends; one of whom flew over to Liverpool from the Isle of Man specially.
Having embarked on painting again recently, it was a timely visit. An extra incentive to make the journey to Liverpool was that Nathan Eastwood, who was in my cohort at UCA when I started as a part-time student, had a piece in the show. He is interested in social realism and the piece was one of the few overtly political paintings on show.
Fellow a-n blogger Franny Swann invited me to give a talk to the Sevenoaks Visual Artists forum last Thursday, along with fellow artist and DAD co-director Joanna Jones. There was a great buzz in the room and lots of positive energy. We had meant to get a conversation going but time ran out. We decided not to do a talk using slides and projector, opting to show some real pieces of work instead. Duncan Brannan asked us whether DAD has an influence on our respective studio practices, which was hard to answer straight away but there is definitely something going on there: at the very least it’s about the conversations we have and our overlapping concerns that are reflected very differently in our work, one of which we touched on briefly – namely gesture.
Settling in to the new studio and getting some work done in there; there is still a lot of tidying up to do but at the moment I have to prioritise making work!
I am thinking I may well take up Joanna’s suggestion of turning the gallery into a studio: takes away the pressure of making “finished” work and actually chimes in very well with my interests. I came across this the other day:
“The life of the work, the ecology of the studio is what I am interested in, when the doors are closed on the pressures of the marketplace. And in this life there is always failure, no matter how much money is made. For it is a given that there is always a gap between what the artist wants the work to be and what it is, between the original goal an the weird paths that are taken. Life continues only as long as the blind chase down the path. There is tremendous fear on that chase because the relationship between the artist and artwork is one of intimacy with the self, and intimacy is truly terrifying and can never be fully achieved. The closer one comes to something really intimate which may seem really foreign), the faster one springs back, and thereby fails.
Despite the fear of intimcacy and the impossibility of achieving completenes within and without, there can be a wonderful sense of anonymity in the practice of art. ….” (Mira Schor, Wet, p.123-124)
Thanks to everyone who has sent wishes to my husband for a speedy recovery. We got one of those foam slings today, which seems to be more comfortable.
Went to get this set of drawings framed. I am never sure about frames, but sometimes drawings just need a frame to protect them or set them off. Fingers crossed for the result.
Got the keys to my new studio space today. Very exciting.
Went to get my husband joggers, shoes with velcro closings and new slippers which are not so worn that another fall down the stairs is highly likely …..
Starting to think about my talk with Joanna Jones for the Sevenoaks Visual Arts forum which Franny Swann has invited us both to do. We will be talking in the Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope gallery, currently showing both or works in “Meeting Room”, perceptively reviewed by David Minton on Interface.
Working very hard in the studio as I have a show coming up – opening on 14 November and PV on 16 November at The Space gallery Folkestone.
The grids in these paintings are drawn freehand – either scratched into the surface or created with thread (raised surface). I’ve been reading “Lines, a brief history” by Tim Ingold and find what he says about the way lines dissolve surfaces really interesting.
The grid paintings started with drawings on Chinese character practice paper, on which one would write the same character again and again, committing the gesture used to write each stroke to memory, and trying to perfect the stroke: repetition as a yearning for perfection.
