The last 10 days have been saturated with input. Last week artist Neil Tait was the speaker at our Thomas Lawrence Lectures. Neil spoke about, ‘how his work comes about’, and how his many influences flow into his painting. He played singles from his collection, and described how he works towards and puts together paintings for an exhibition. At his recent show at White Cube, Hoxton Square, I was compelled by the positioning of the drawing wall, placed across the opening of the ground floor gallery, facing the viewer with the importance to him of the ideas, and slowing us down to engage with the rhythm of the work. I had a tutorial with Neil during the afternoon and enjoyed our conversation, his suggestion to me to have work progressing at different paces was very helpful, as mostly I work fast. He also said how in our work there are stages when we are working in, ‘advance of our understanding’. This made a lot of sense to me and may explain why we feel we don’t know what we are doing some of the time. All very inspirational as I start to focus my studio time towards the exhibition in June.
This evening was the second lecture of the four planned for this academic year, artist Perry Roberts, based in Antwerp, showed how his work has developed since his M.A. at Goldsmiths and revealed the reoccurring themes and threads. I am always so motivated by investigating and hearing about an artist’s practice, just talking about making work gets me moving.
http://www.whitecube.com/artists/tait/
