It was good to be back at the Centre for Drawing today after the weekend. After a busy day I’ve now only got two working days left, my head is bursting full of ideas and I don’t have enough time to work through one tenth of them. It’s hard to keep a realistic perspective on what I’ll have finished by Wednesday evening. I’m teaching all day Thursday and will then be back at CfD on Friday with just a couple of hours to tidy up and present what I’ve done over my eight days there before the space is open to visitors in the afternoon. It’s not much time but I’m remaining positive that there will be something worthy of showing people on Friday.
I keep wondering if I should have gone into the residency with a plan to make something specific, as all I’ll have by the end of my time there is a series of exploratory studies and small tests. I’m sure nothing will look as resolved or impressive as I’d have liked it to before starting the residency. I feel content with that though, which surprises the perfectionist part of my personality (if you don’t know me that’s quite a large part of my make up). I’ll be leaving the space with a lot of new ideas to take back to my studio, not just plans for new work but an intentness to employ different materials in resolving future work. Moreover, this is the first period of time for over five years where I’ve had so many consecutive days to make work without interruptions from teaching or family responsibilities. I’ve felt able to relax and enjoy working without a plan, to be responsive and try things out without knowing what the outcome will be. This has been a very positive aspect of the residency for me.
The first thing I did today was to make a list of things I can realistically work through before Wednesday evening. Obviously as the day wore on that list got even longer, so tomorrow I’ll need to trim it back again to something more manageable. I worked through a few quick ideas in my sketchbook, and applied some gloss varnish to selected areas of some drawings I’d made last week. I’ve started to be interested in the relationship between glossy, varnished areas of a drawing and the matt paper, which may be as a result of me being inspired by the reflected light in the CfD studio. I did some more work on the wall drawing with the pinned, stretched black cord. It’s a drawing that could go on forever, and I wish I had enough time to continue it across a whole wall. Then I made a small wall piece with white card cut into geometric shapes. The side of the card that faces is wall is flourescent pink, which causes a colour cast on the white painted surface. I felt that this was a successful sketch for something larger and made with more resilient materials at a later date. It will be important on Friday to document all these things well, so I can return to them in my own studio and continue to develop them into something complete. It’s frustrating having so many ideas that won’t be fully ‘finished’ by the end of the week but very exciting to know I’ll be moving out of the Centre for Drawing with lots still to do.
