I’ve “discovered” painting with mud.
(Gasp! horror- I usually work digitally)
How did this come about?
Well I have just been to Dollar Summer School.
(Few outside the central belt of Scotland know about this unique school – now in its 54th year. Its run by a group of art teachers and operates out of purpose built Art centre at Dollar Academy thanks to a £1million donation by a former grateful pupil who made his fortune doing the graphic design for Macdonald hamburger).
Feeling frustrated with traditional watercolours I began to look around for some new materials to paint with.
As a long time admirer of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy I wondered whether the answer might lie in going right back to our roots: to the earth that primitive Man first used to decorate their caves.
So I dug up some up from the garden and experimented.
Our class tutor, wildlife artist Clare Harkess, offered encouragement and support though the rest of the class were somewhat bewildered.
Mud behaves like ink with the added bonus that you can change the consistency -and it’s free!
And the images? I find myself creating a whole menagerie of strange mythical creatures that look as if they have erupted from the bowels of the earth during some volcanic explosion.
As we hurtle into the 21st century into a future that none of us can imagine it is a reminder of where we have come from…and may one day return.
NB
There are many web sites devoted to the genre of mud paintings and working with unusual materials. Just google it.
“The One Show” BBC Television – and “The Children of Craig-y-nos” book
Well, it’s over – my one minute of fame on the “One Show” talking about my childhood experiences of four years locked up in a remote Welsh castle, converted into a children’s TB sanatorium.
I wrote a book about it “The Children of Craig-y-nos” – hence the media interest.
My companion, Pamela Hamer, who was there in the sanatorium at the same time as a 8 year old was totally unfazed by live television – the six million viewers and the clutch of celebrities in the audience waiting their turn on the green sofa ( Angela Rippon, the Spandeau Ballet pop group and comedian Paul O’Grady).
She was determined to tell her rat story : how she woke up one night to find a rat scurrying through her bed and the night orderly consoled her by telling her it was Joey, the pet rat from the kitchen come to say good-night to her. Pamela was encased in a plaster cast unable to move.
Dealing with rejection
I was at a gallery opening on Saturday night and friends kept coming up to me:
“Where is your work? why isn’t it in?”
And I had to confess:” I’ve been rejected.”
Now if you are an artist or writer you get used to it. Or you give up making work.
But how do you deal with rejection?
Well, you can toughen yourself up by trying The Rejection Generator Project:
http://stoneslidecorrective.com/?page_id=441,
It will send you emails automatically with scathing comments. Here’s some:
“Dear Writer,
I enjoyed reading the opening pages of your novel but you didn’t follow our submission guidelines. Prospective authroos must be at least sixteen years of age. Based on the chapters you sent us,, I doubt you are older than ten.”
Or
“Dear Artist
We can see all the work, care, ane even love that you’ve put into this piece, which makes it harder to tell you that we won;’t be accepting it.
this is hard for us, because we just can’t stop laughing….All tht work, aall the devotions of your soul and your heart, and you produce this?”
I think you get the drift.
As Nietzche said:
“That which does not kill us make us stronger.”
Good to catch up with Rosie Gibson in the macrobert arts centre.
Rosie and I graduated in 2001 from Glasgow School of Art and she is currently working as artist in residence at th Macrobert researching a sculpture project for children.
Meanwhile it is all happening for older artists in Scotland.
Our Keep Dancing class, ( run by the macrobert arts centre), has grown legs.
Literally. One of our members, Anne Aiken, has launched a tap-dancing class for adults.
This month sees the launch of Luminate, the first ever festival on ageing in Scotland.
Stirling’s contribution is a new theatre performance by dance artist Natasha Gilmore called Ultra Violet, an intergenerational event which will be premiered at the Macrobert Arts Centre at the end of the month.
With deep regret I had to pull out because of other commitments but it looks like a most exciting project.
I have just finished another book on Wales – what a relief!-so I can now get back to doing some visual work.
After all I do have a solo exhibition coming up in the Spring. So it is back to the drawing board, or iPad in my case.
I am sitting on the floor of the Tate Turbine Hall and strangers keep coming up to me and telling me highly ppersonal stories about themselves.
There is the young Chinese engineer who confesses to being a reformed liar, the Caribbean woman who dreams every night of carrying a heavy load of stones on her back up a very steep hill and the Sri Lankan woman who can’t decide whether to have children or not.
For they are all storytellers and part of Tino Sehgal’s radical installation, the first performance piece to be given space in the Turbine Hall.
One thing the Tate had not expected though is that members of the public would join in, not so much with the storytelling as with the participation in the event by running, walking and singing too.
And I too joined in. It was a theatrical experience bordering on the quasi-religious in the way it brought total strangers together so that they became one huge cohesive body moving, flowing and sometimes stationery in the huge space of the Turbine Hall.
Did it work? Yes, because we have reached a stage in the visual world where we no longer want to stand passively in front of a work of art. We want , and expect in this internet age, to be able to interact with it in some way.
We are witnessing th blurring of edges between the arts, helpd by technology: the artist and viewer become inter-changeable, like th writer and the reader.
Will the artist and writr in the future become more like curators?
Yet the work had a surprising sense of deja-vu for me. Some ten years ago while an internationl exchange student to The School of the Art Institute in Chicago I witnessed a very similar performance by some students in their end of term show.
