Diary of an artist writer online

Steamer Lane, rock group of retired professional men challenging perceptions of growing old.

They are the first to kick off my project “time of Our Lives” with a performance in the streets of Stirling.

With Forth Valley Open Studios less than two weeks away it is a hectic time for us all.

To add to the pressure this Sunday we open our garden to the public , along with several others in our small town of Bridge of Allan under Scotland’s Open Garden scheme.

My interest in gardens dovetails with my artistic work so I was interested to hear a discussion on the radio from this year’s Chelsea Flower Show over whether gardens could be considered “works of art”.

Some gardeners expressed surprise. Well, having experience of both I am under no illusion: gardens are works of art.

During last year”s Open Studios it was a salutary lesson to witness public taste: folk preferred my garden to the works in my studio.

I think it was the sense of discovery they experienced ( it is designed on the principle of outdoor rooms) combined with a sense that they were viewing something organic and living not still images on a wall.

Whatever.

Waiting for the winds of 70mph ripping through Scotland to drop off before I go over to Delta Studios with work for the Forth Valley Open Studios exhibition.

(http://www.forthvalleyopenstudios.com/)

I am submitting an installation called “Mobile Art” of an 100 images are all created either on on my iphone or ipad .

Last year I sold my iphone images for £5 each.

They proved to be very popular but they were certainly not cost effective considering the work that went into them for they were individually printed and mounted on foam board.

Also I was very uneasy with this arrangement then for I seemed to be trying to stay with one foot in the traditional print world and the other in the digital.

And succeeding in neither.

So this year I have freed myself from the tyranny of trying to produce conventional art for sale and I am giving the images away for free – in digital form sent either to peoples mobiles or computers.

I feel a lot happier with this arrangement since the images were designed on an electronic device and should be viewed on one.

David Hockney recent exhibition in Paris abandoned canvas altogether and he showed work created and shown entirely on electronic devices. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11666162

No sign of winds dropping so will video the storm instead and go to Delta Studios tomorrow.

Time of our Lives…challenging perceptions of older people

We were just about to start filming the soft rock group Steamer Lane on Saturday in the middle of Stirling when they started: the South American pan pipers with all their amplifiers going full blast.

Try competing against that!

I had this tremendous sense of deja- vu. Ten years ago in my Degree show at Glasgow School of Art I had installed a sound installation “Duet” of birds singing and a cat purring. It was a lyrical piece and it was set up in the Loggia, top of the Macintosh building.

Suddenly from the “Hen Run” adjoining I hear shots. The student next to me had installed a Western style shooting gallery as his degree piece…. I had to find a new space sharpish.

Well, we did get the filming done, once the South American players stopped for an early afternoon siesta but this is one of the problems when you are working with sound and in a public space.

You have got to be prepared to think fast and find solutions.

“Listen to your tutors”. That was the advise from an artist whose workshop I attended before going to art college as a mature student.

Of course I didn’t! And I regret it. Now ten years later words from some tutors come floating back to me, words that at the time I ignored because I reckoned I knew better.

Yes there was an awful lot of dubious pseudo-intellectual jargon talked but there was a core of excellence at Glasgow School of Art and it was a case of tapping into it.

I thought of this the other day while attending a workshop in the Changing Room gallery Stirling on video performance.

“ We want to make you feel a bit uncomfortable. We want to get you out of your comfort zone.”

Yes I heard words similar to those ten years ago …except then I chose to ignore it because I did not appreciate what they were getting at.

If you do work that you know and are comfortable with you are not stretching yourselves, you are not pushing boundaries.

And if you know in advance what you want to do then you are doing somebody else’s work.

Forth Valley Open Studios

Publicity is kicking in. A number of artists have been contacted by our local papers and have been interviewed.

(www.forthvalleyopenstudios.com)