Life has rushed past recently stomping over plans, thoughts and intentions, but the momentum of chaos has still delivered me to a good place. I’m in a gallery with new work on the walls and being here feels like stepping free of congealed glue. A sense that despite truly awful global events and challenging personal commitments, my work has gained its own autonomy and resilience, able rise above messy, sticky life.
To keep moving with my work though, I may need to make a new plan or at least adapt. I’m increasingly spending more time caring for my father, its a push pull thing, I want to spend time with him and for the remainder of his life to be what he wants it to be, but sometimes it feels as though my own thoughts and energy are slowly suffocating, eaten away in a reflection of the cancer and Alzheimer’s consuming him. I want too, to avoid a sudden crisis where everything falls into a void, gobbled up by unmanaged care needs.
But the feeling that my work is on its own journey, that it has a life of its own, that it wants to go somewhere, that it has intention even if I haven’t grasped what that is, makes it easier to reserve enough of myself just for that. I may only be able to get in my work space occasionally, but i know that when I do my work and I are there for each other.
I’ve been thinking about names. As the artist, untitled is fine, I make the work, spend time with it, know it intimately and no name is needed; I move through relationship phases, by turns falling in love, hating it, arguing, collaborating, but there’s no need to name it any more than there is to use the name of your lover in bed, who else would you be talking to? But I’ve decided that when my work goes to a gallery it needs a name such that the viewer who has only just met it, has an opener, a way in with which they can strike up a conversation with the work.
‘Untitled’ is obviously not going to cut it; ‘Boy and Ram’ identifies it, but does it get us any further than introducing someone at a party as ‘Man in a Shirt’? The picture is about parental decisions and shows Isaac, freed, running down the mountain with the unlucky ram left in his place. I was pondering the nature of sacrifice and betrayal and how Isaac and Abraham rebuild their relationship after this event. My first title was ‘Sacrifice’, but whilst not taking the viewer anywhere, it imposes a fixed concept on the viewer when they need to bring their own meanings, memories and experiences into the conversation. When work leaves the possession of the artist it starts to acquire its own narrative independent of the artist’s intentions and maybe the title needs to be a conduit to that too, even if eventually its identity does become ‘Boy and Ram’. So to send it on its way into the world I would like to rename this piece ‘Isaac, Why do you run?
Seeing Direction
This week I’ve been pushing my head into exhibition mode, planning to avoid an undignified headless chicken flap later on – although with years of practice I like to think that I am now a last minute master.
I visited Carousel in Framlingham with Val, we’re booked for May. It’s a small space hired to artists an craftspeople, there’s an easy hanging system and a good window, the best thing I’ve seen there was an automaton, which I seem to remember had a combined theme of teaching and decapitation. I like Fram, it has a couple of good cafes, a castle and Ed Sheehan, we came away enthused.
Yesterday was spent looking through paintings, drawings and prints and making decisions. This year I’m participating in a number of shows and I’d planned on a show of narrative work, a show of my Postcard Project and another of woodcuts. When I sorted through the work I saw I was looking at something else quite different, indeed, I didn’t even get the postcard work out for consideration. I’ve known what direction I wanted my work to travel in for some time, but only yesterday did I see it was on it’s way.
Like everyone else my current thoughts are continually pulled back to the nightmare that Ukraine has become. Compassion, horror and outrage for the Ukrainians and those who have found welcome in Ukraine has created a thought structure in my head through which everything else must pass for me to know its importance and context.
This week I’ve been using the work of John and Paul Nash with my students. my plan was that they should find inspiration in the geographic familiarity of John’s landscapes – I’m teaching about 20 miles away from Wormingford – and something more surreal and cerebral from Paul. The overview of their work presented by the library books I took into class obviously included their war work too and I couldn’t help but realise that I was seeing these images as if for the first time. A student bought in a Tate catalogue of Aftermath, an exhibition of artists’ responses to experiences of the First World War and as I flicked through looking at different images, I could feel a compassion for the people I was seeing I hadn’t properly felt before and a different understanding too of the artists making the work.
It’s impossible to know at this moment what changes this will bring to my own work, there is only a sense of certainty that there’s mo going back.
The week that’s just gone was half term here, I always think I’m going to get a lot done in the holidays and then mentally berate myself when I haven’t. I see big blocks of time and conjure them full of art making and imagine all the finished work I will have made by the end of the week. It never works like that – I set the day aside for painting or printmaking, that is creating things which will be finished, exhibit-able things (wherein lies the problem), but its the holiday, I have more time, I take a little longer to do my usual tasks then go to my workroom and decide I’ll make a cup of tea, I’ve made the tea and then remember I didn’t put the dates in my diary from yesterday’s email, I open my inbox…. a day of productive activity becomes a day of petty distractions.
The two problems I have here are failing to remind myself that actually I work better in little chunks of time, but more importantly how I prioritise different sorts of art activity. Because I have exhibitions approaching I’ve convinced myself that every moment must be spent on making work that can go on walls. But achieving quality or at the very least some sense of satisfactory completeness within my work can only come from time spent playing, daydreaming and trying.
