Someone from firstsite (a contemporary visual arts organisation, based here in the East of England) came to the studio today and we discussed ways to take my ‘Alice’ project forward. It’s so great that they want to be supportive. I make the work; they’ll help me get it into venues as a touring show. She’s gone off to research and identify galleries to approach; I now need to come up with a good title and also crack on with making the pieces. The aim is to get 20 large works on paper. I’ve already done six, some of which have been seen on this blog, but I’ve decided I want to eliminate colour and just work with monochrome, so none of the six will form part of the package. The only precedent for this (monochrome) is the short residency I did at firstsite a few months ago. I have the appropriate anxiety about this (what if I can’t pull it off?) which should make for continuing boundary-breaking as I’m sure to keep coming up against the ‘sod it, it’s hideous, I’ll have to do something drastic to it’ which occasionally leads to breakthroughs… (And also, sadly, often leads to crumpled messes in the bin!)
Migraine’s gone now, so I’m full of energy. Just got to make sure I spend that energy in the studio now, and not on the hoovering…
Metaphor. Someone said yesterday that if you can find a metaphor for a problem, and look at the situation from that point of view, you’re half-way to solving it. I like that.
Another friend has a theory that good art is metaphor, bad art is simile. He reckons it’s very straightforward. Personally I don’t think I can define art in blanket terms like that. I think art can be so much in the eye of the beholder. (An example: I was in someone’s studio a while ago and was transfixed by the paint splashes on a small patch of floor. It seemed to me to be so much more lyrical and successful as a painting than any of the works on canvas… except that, of course, it wasn’t an artwork at all, it was neither consciously created nor held up as a piece of art.)
Anyway, right now the main metaphor in my life is that of an axe crashing through my head – I’ve been suffering for three days with an awful migraine. I want to get in the studio but there’s no point trying to make art in this state: with a migraine, my way of looking, thinking and acting gets narrow and tedious. Idea: maybe I should work with the axe metaphor somehow, and imagine the positive aspects of what an axe can do – opening up, loosening, freeing, and releasing pent-up energy…
BBC Radio 4, the artist’s friend… What I love about Radio 4 is – well, lots of things. Most of all, it’s the way I can hear other creative people speak, particularly writers, but also visual artists, dancers, choreographers, musicians, etc, etc. It opens up fresh ways of looking at things, which after all is what creativity is. I know several artists who listen while they’re working.
However – unless I’m doing something routine such as stretching canvases or something, I don’t have the radio on when I’m actually in the studio, because it takes me into a different space. I need music whilst I work, but it needs to be somewhat familiar to me, and reasonably predictable (i.e. an album, not ‘shuffled’) so that I can be present and responsive with my work in a particular way. Having said all that, in doing these portraits recently, I’ve found that it’s okay to have my sitter watching a DVD or listening to a comedy CD [What I’ve Learned About Portrait Painting Lately, Part Umpteen – make sure it’s comedy, in an attempt to stop the sitter looking too mournful…].
Top choices for studio CD’s vary, I go through phases, but probably the most enduring is the Cocteau Twins.
Time to stop blogging and get in the studio…
I’ve been in the Lake District all week, out walking in the hills every day, letting the richness of the landscape wash through me. The colours, the drama of ‘the Sublime’, the light (sun every single day!), but most of all it’s the textures that feed me. Mosses and lichens and rocks and glittering water. And never once do I feel that I want to ‘paint it’, or make any other kind of artwork around it. I often wonder why it is that for me, the urge to make art is so very particular in its focus. Am I unconsciously restricting myself, damming up some of the channels of creativity in favour of the one that primarily addresses the human form, and does so primarily in paint?
I’ve been offered a solo show for February 2012. I’m pleased by the timing because it gives a good length of time to gradually amass work for it. I work on some of my paintings, on and off, for years. It’s one of the deep joys and luxuries of not being a student!
Meanwhile I need to think about a show that’s coming up in June. I’d always planned this one as a chance to give some older work another airing. The trouble is that whenever I say that, I generally end up being unable to bear to show old work, because the new work is always what excites me most. What should I do with the old work? It gets stacked up, taking up space. Of course some can be painted over, some ripped up, but… what about the paintings that lots of people say they really like, and that I think are good. No-one has yet bought them, but they may well sell one day. Oh to be Marlene Dumas or Shani Rhys-James, wistfully I imagine that they probably have someone scuttling around removing finished work and either selling it straight away or putting it safe storage somewhere!
Space pressures in my little studio are intense at the moment, because I’m doing so many different things concurrently… Paintings (several at once) plus all the oil-painting equipment; large drawings, with a broad selection of pots of acrylic, ink, pastels, pencils, charcoal, etc; and then there’s the new portrait painting side of things, with a chair for the sitter etc.
