Paint and the Self

I’ve been studying for the last four years: one year doing an Advanced Diploma in the Therapeutic Application of the Arts at IATE in London; followed by three years doing an MA in Integrative Arts Psychotherapy (also at IATE)… What a journey! It’s been amazing, and life-changing, and I’ve learned so much…

It all fits so well with my work as an artist, and already I’ve been using a lot of things I’m learning, in my art workshops. Two workshop series are coming up: one series of five workshops at firstsite, Colchester (‘Painting the Imagination’), and one series of four Life-Drawing workshops at the Minories, also in Colchester (‘New Approaches to Life-Drawing’). Both will be suitable for all levels of experience – I’ve had many experienced artists, a few complete beginners, and many people in-between – anyone who wants to refresh and develop their creativity, really – and because we work on various levels and in such individual ways, everyone can get a lot from the workshops to suit them. I love running these, helping people connect with their creativity in new ways.

And I love the one-to-one work I’ve been doing with clients in Integrative Arts Psychotherapy. Everyone is so different, and the deeper my understanding of them (and their understanding of themselves) gets, the more extraordinary and astonishing they seem to become.

The local visual arts organisation, firstsite – soon to have an amazing new space which they are careful not to call a ‘gallery’ (!) – has set up a Collectors’ Group, who came to visit me a few days ago. I showed them some work, and took them into the studio, and talked about my work, and they seemed to go off quite content. In fact, they went off to have lunch at Jardine bistro, where I have work on show at the moment, so hopefully they felt that all fitted in well. It’s odd not having feedback though.

I’m funny about talking about my work. Friends tease me because I’m usually deeply reluctant to do it. But sometimes, if I sense a genuinely interested audience, and I’m geared up to talk, and the environment is calm and quiet enough so it’s not a strain to be heard, in the end I find loads to say. But I always want to emphasise that painting is painting, a different language from speech, and words can never be adequate to express what is communicated in a painting. Words can sometimes help as signposts, though, I suppose, to help guide people towards a deeper understanding of what the painting is saying.

Finally I have taken the plunge to ‘go frameless’ and it seems to work well in my current show, ‘The Vivid Gaze’. The exhibition is actually in a bistro, not a gallery; I’ve never shown work in this type of venue before, and was a little hesitant when they first asked me, but it’s proved a great way of getting the work seen by loads of people. People keep coming up to me and giving feedback about the show, which can be really interesting.

http://www.jardine-bistro.co.uk/

Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve had a 6-month ‘sabbatical’ from blogging. Somehow I felt a need to become very quiet and private with regard to my work, and my relationship to the art world (in its wider sense). I had begun to feel a bit conflicted with the aspect of being an artist that involves using words rather than paint, and particularly with anything to do with marketing. But of course some marketing is essential if you want to encourage the flow of work through and out of the studio, whilst earning enough money to keep going… It’s a problematic area for me just at the moment.

And my website, www.emmacameron.com, is ages out of date, because I need to spend a lot of time and probably money on reconfiguring access to it (ever since I got a new laptop there has been a problem, and even the geekiest friends have admitted being stumped about how to solve it, after hours of trying…). I resolve to somehow get it sorted this month though!

I’m the ‘Visiting Artist’ this week at a girls’ school in Gloucestershire, partly working with some of the pupils, and partly working alone on a piece on paper, 7 metres long. The pupils are very lucky, because they have had real animals to work from: various dogs, a barn owl, two tarantulas, and a tortoise. The girls are coming up with some great work, and they’re loving the experience. As far as my own piece went, I was very anxious for the first couple of days that it wasn’t working, and was dull and predictable – but eventually exasperation took over and once I’d made a few drastic changes (including obliterating a figure that I’d spent hours sweating over) and fought with it a lot, it began to turn around. I ended up with landscape in it too – unheard-of for me. I feel like the week has allowed my practice to move on a bit, as I’d hoped it might but had feared it wouldn’t.

One of the hardest things when making art is putting aside all thoughts about pleasing one’s audience. Notions of how I imagine a certain type of viewer might react keep creeping into my consciousness as I’m working. I try quite hard to disregard these thoughts, and keep searching for what it is that I am trying to express. My paintings need to be coherent, and honest, and direct, otherwise what’s the point? Plus, who is this imagined audience? Is it the people at the High Table of the Art World, the major galleries and the funding bodies and those who influence them; or the smaller galleries who take (or might potentially take) my work; or curators and writers; or my fellow artists; or the people who’ve bought my work in the past; or my family and friends? It’s ridiculous to try to work to please any of these, in no small part because in pleasing one set, you probably automatically alienate another!

I painted in the studio today with a huge sense of relief, because yesterday all my precious studio time was taken up with going to east London to collect work that didn’t get into the Threadneedle exhibition. I have to keep brushing away the questions that bubble up in my mind, the ones that go along the lines of ‘Why didn’t they ‘get’ it?’ People look at my work and they must see something different from what I see, there’s clearly something fundamental that somebody (them or me) doesn’t get. Ah well. There’s lots that I just don’t get. Elizabeth Peyton’s work, for example.

Here’s the painting I was working on. I don’t know how close it is to being finished. Could be almost there; could be that I’ll end up obliterating the whole thing… We’ll see. Today, I like it.