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.
