Before Hindsight

Self-portrait, pastel on Ingres paper.

I like pastels because they’re immediate. I can get an intuitive reaction onto paper, and then work it at leisure – no need to dry (like oils), or be worked quickly (like acrylics). Suited for family life with unpredictable workloads.

Almost all my visual work begins as pastel studies.

I work intuitively with colour and shape. These drawings are about relationships – with people, places, anything.

Everybody feels different depending on who they’re with … And that feeling fundamentally colours our relationship with that person.

For me, portraits are about (literally) depicting the colour of relationships. And a self-portrait is about depicting my relationship with myself. This requires a little time, honesty, soul-searching, some internal reflection while gazing at my reflection in the mirror.

I used to feel a likeness was important. Then I painted a portrait of an artist friend, which I was pleased with. I commented “I’ve caught a good likeness there”. “Ha ha!”, they replied “apart from the purple skin and green hair!”. I realised that “likeness” is a distraction from what’s actually happening in the painting. I’m now comfortable with abstraction, using the shapes, as well as the colours, in depicting relationship.

After a period of reflection, I start feeling drawn to certain colours: blue and yellow. I start with the cheek, running down between the lines stemming from the corner of my eye. Moving to another part of the paper, the shapes formed by my nose, upper lip, and lower cheek. I avoid classical features, but allow the line of my lower lip, alongside the line of my eyebrows.

My beard and hair are suddenly important, and dominate as upper and lower frames for the drawing. Now I’m pulled towards reds and oranges, mixing with the yellow.

Next I concentrate on the boundary of my face. My reflection is framed by several rectilinear features: bookcase, cassette tapes, door and doorframe; also softer features like the towel draped over the door. These fill the paper between my facial surfaces, appearing in orange.

I stand back and view the collection of part-sketches as a whole. I envision the outcome, the shapes and boundaries that are suggested by the parts, and I divide the drawing with swift lines, snaking around nose, bookcase, cheek-line, towel, lower lip. Nothing remains, the parts have become a new whole; a hidden world has revealed itself.

I continue adding colour, texture and shading, immersed in a trance whose decisions and actions are unaccountable, inexplicable.

Suddenly I awake: it’s almost done. A few colouration issues, and for these I stand back again, assess the balance, and finish up with confidence.

The final task is fixation. Fixative disperses the white, so I go over all the highlights with extra white, then apply the fixative. As it dries, the final image emerges. It’s OK, the painting suggests some interesting things … but there’s room for improvement, things to do differently next time, bits I’ll never be happy with …

Oxford Improvisers – what a great find! 10 years ago when I was last doing this kind of thing, I’d have donated several limbs to medical science to have a resource such as this. Now, when I’m just thinking of returning to improvisation as a vague possibility, it falls – plonk – right in my lap.

Meetings every Monday evening, which in theory is one of my evenings “off” from the kids; and only 500 yards from home. Just perfect. Except that so far the school play, a bout of gastric flu, and a customer’s network emergency have prevented my attendance at 3 of the last 4 meetings. Never mind, it will happen!

On a whim, I attended a “Sacred Clowning” workshop on Saturday run by Madeleine Forey … a clown. Fantastic fun. Not recommended for conceptualists and cynics. Reminded me of why I’m doing this art thing in the first place. Refreshing and inspiring.

Have finally got my last exhibition (Rites – see “after Rites”) on the web, or at least enough bits of it to make it worth advertising. Thanks to Paul Freestone for beautiful closeup photos of the paintings. Can be viewed at http://www.dreamcraft.org.uk/ritesexhibition/Rites.php

Still no joy combusting canvas, and now have a bag of highly toxic chemicals to dispose of. It looks disconcertingly like orange sherbert … I warned my own kids off it, just hope nobody else’s break into the shed and dip their fingers in …!

Tomorrow, I have an appointment to fix a laptop for Age Concern, Thursday it’s Milton Keynes to help set up a new office for Connection Floating Support, and Friday have to sort out the email contacts on a Judge’s laptop. At some point I have to find time to let my customers know that I’m not working for the next 2 weeks, as I’ve had enough of it all … not to mention the X word.

Once I’ve done my accounts, invoicing, mileage, shopping and statutory seasonal parties, and scheduled holiday childcare arrangements with my partner, I should get 3 days in my studio. I usually spend one of those days trying to remember why I’m there in the first place …

Over the last 6 months I’ve spent most of my “ringfenced” creative time (about 1 day a week) marketing my teaching business: various aspects of dreams and ritual aimed at psychotherapists and art therapists. My greatest success was to persuade Roehampton to let me run a 1 day workshop. Great! I can put Roehampton on my CV. BUT – the course was cancelled due to lack of interest … can I still put it on my CV?

Other than that, I have a total of 8 hours of confirmed teaching work coming up for the next 12 months. There are also a dozen organisations on the “interested – call back” list … so not an entirely lost cause, and teaching work does grow via recommendation. So, I’ve given it my best shot, time to return to something creative.

Time is now more precious than it was 6 months ago. My daughter has been diagnosed with a hip condition that requires weekly visits to the swimming pool, fortnightly visits to the physiotherapist, and monthly visits to the consultant. Due to a collision between the appointment times, pool opening times and my partner’s working hours, the bulk of this extra caring has fallen on my shoulders, and the time has to be stolen from my studio time.

On the brighter side, my son is now old enough, and willing enough, to babysit his little sister, so the possibility of creative work during the evenings is returning, and could become a regular addition to my studio time.

At the moment I am exploring in two main directions:

1) Continuing the ritual-style events, I have been rather taken with a Tibetan Buddhist ritual which involves months of painstaking manufacture of ritual items, all of which are chucked on the fire at the end of the ritual – a practical demonstration of impermanence and emptiness – Thinks: Storing large scale works is becoming a pain, and since, realistically, I’m never going to sell any of these things, I may as well ritually burn them at the end of an event … and it would be a great spectacle, as well as being theoretically justifiable.

Problem: Canvas covered in acrylic paint is not as flammable as one might imagine, how to make it go off with more of a roar than a whimper? Have tried various experiments with various petroleum products, gunpowder extracted from fireworks, potassium nitrate extracted from gunpowder extracted from fireworks, various ammonium compounds, and some dabbling with chromate oxidising agents … As yet, the primed and painted canvas remains exceedingly reluctant to combust. My next stop will be the UK Pyrotechnic Society, but in the meantime any ideas are very welcome.

2) This is a more traditional Live Art direction – Outdoor collaborative improvisation (music, movement, video, clowning, text etc.). Inspired by my experience taking my son up Snowdon in September, and encountering massive queues at every stage from the bus stop to the summit. Captive audiences, plenty of publicity potential. Anyone interested?