London London London! And taking stock
The shock of returning from the residency is beginning to wear off. It has been so hectic I can’t believe a month has already passed since I got back. Initially I found it hard adjusting back to the complexity of my life back home. One particular day when I’d forgotten my oyster card made me want to return to my straight forward life in Pietrasanta.
I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learnt from my residency, and a very strong thing is about working method and how to create the climate for me to do great work. In Pietrasanta there is such a strong work ethic. I’m sure this stems from the marble carving tradition and if its going to take 6 months to carve a work, you want to keep putting the hours in. But it really normalises the idea of doing an 8 – 10 hour day, 5 or 6 days a week. I don’t think you are creative for every hour of that, but by putting in those studio hours, you can in some ways take your time to do the work well and push it to its limit.
Since being back in London I had a great chat with a musician/composer friend, and he was advocating that you just need to get the work done. He thought anyone could start something, but not many people could finish. I’m not entirely sure I agree with this, as I used to have that fear of the blank page and I often procrastinate before starting a piece. But I can see what he meant, the studios of many artists, and apparently the computers of many composers, are littered with unfinished work. Once you start something, you need to push it through to completion.
What was great about my residency was that I was working long hours and under pressure which I often do when I am up against a deadline. But the great thing was that I also had freedom if I wanted to experiment, take a tangent or just wait and look at the work some more. I need to recreate these conditions on an ongoing basis. I often worry that only obsessive compulsive people make great artists, which I don’t think I am. But I do love it when I get a little bit lost in my work. Again the musician thought that too many composers did this, and that you could keep changing and rechanging a work, and not realise when its finished.
I think this is an interesting duality, either loosing steam on a piece for whatever reasons (often other pressures and leaving it too long) or over working a piece till it looses its magic. Hmmm, knowing when to finish is an art in itself.
This reminded me of Helaine in her catalogue talking about the theory that you could (or even should) complete a work in a single sitting. In that way, the purity of a single thought or way of looking at your subject matter would come through.
Before leaving Pietrasanta I was fairly clear about the sort of work I wanted to be doing for the next 6 – 12 months at least. I decided that I’d learnt so much from each of the 3 pieces I did in Italy, that I wanted to continue working on the same scale, in a limited number of materials and try to complete at least one new piece a month. This was partly inspired by looking at Yves Dana’s catalogue of work, and in the 80s he was doing 13 – 15 works a year. The obvious way to fund this is that I need to start selling the work, and to look for a gallery. In some ways the scale of work and the style would lend itself to this.
But since I’ve been back in London, I’ve started to wonder whether I want to start heading down that particular route, and whether it will limit my options in future. I feel like I’m trying to create works that really say something, but I feel uncomfortable with the idea of them being thought of as luxury decorative pieces to complete a wealthy lifestyle. However, the only sales I have done I haven’t felt like this. In fact, it was been an amazing process knowing that (my handful of) clients are so taken by my work that they want to live with the pieces permanently in their homes.
So, dilemmas dilemmas.
