Well, here we are at Easter Monday, a sunny, blustery day outside and here I am crouched over my computer, writing this. Work consumes all at present and my social life has died of neglect. We normally go skiing at Easter but this year we all have far too much to do at home; we’re all on holiday but it doesn’t seem like it. The boys have gone to the footie but M is doing her Art GCSE coursework and after this, I’ll be doing something similar, then cooking supper. I’m firmly of the opinion that the time to undertake a degree, even part time, is not when you have a home and family to look after. No matter how ‘on fire’ you feel creatively, domestic organisation always takes precedence. It can be dreadfully frustrating at times and I have been known to complain volubly and often but I wouldn’t have it any other way now.
As the blog intro says, I make paintings and artist’s books, which incorporate printmaking. Over the past couple of years I’ve developed a very fluid painting style using pigments mixed with varying ratios of oil and turpentine, sometimes thinned with white spirit. I was strongly influenced a few years ago by Gerhard Richter’s aquarelles and was struggling to imitate his dense curtains of colour when we were visited by the artist, Kwai Lau, who gave a workshop demonstration of her technique. It is her technique that has influenced my own painting methods. I suppose you could say that my work is based on colour and proportion, and it is, but I have to have a concept from which to work in order to develop the image.
At CCAD we progress along a path of ‘negotiated learning’ with increasing independence. We are encouraged to link our dissertation with our body of work, which makes eminent sense to me. My dissertation grew out of my work and vice versa. Briefly, I was concerned with the cycle of life, as Dylan Thomas incomparably put it:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer
and looking at myths of regeneration such as the Green Man image. The point of my dissertation was that, no matter how masked by the cosmetic of contemporary culture and religious dogma, life is still organised on the primordial belief system of the ancients, based on the passage of the sun and moon and superstitions regarding the annual ‘rebirth’ of nature. The myths and symbols repeat across many belief systems, indicating an ancient wisdom sublimated over the ages and all but extinguished in post Cartesian belief in the West, where sign has been superseded by the written word. The story of Man’s expulsion from Eden allegorises the loss of this primal wisdom or consciousness, the signs of which remain in legend, fantasy and myth and also in arcane belief systems such as Alchemy. Carl Jung posited that we have a conscious self and an unconscious ego, which should strive to join together in a process he termed individuation. He interpreted the alchemical process as an allegory of individuation; the union of opposites, the fixed and the volatile, male and female, sol and luna. The search for the Holy Grail is interpreted by many as a similar allegory (by the way, Mike did you know the HG or Nanteos Cup was once kept in Lloyd’s Bank in Aberystwyth?). So, my present work is based on the alchemical sequence itself which I will describe in the next blog.
Here, though, we’re still at Easter and I won’t even begin to talk you through the signs and symbols that permeate this festival. If I manage to get my images on this blog, they are concerned with such things. They concern the passage of the sun, Twins depicting the twin gods of the waxing and waning year; Triple Moon Goddess, the passage of life reflected in the cycle of the moon; the birth of the alphabet.
