Backintheroom.
And I’m back in the room…feels like I have been gone for ages. The truth is I have been in a sort of limbo-like state causing me to question everything unable to orient myself in terms of my practice. I blame the blog, it got me writing and now I can’t stop but where does that leave everything else? Earlier in the year I embarked on a writing project that is every bit as creatively taxing as making. In the meantime, half started bits of painting and lonely textiles linger reproachfully.
During academic study I stopped doing certain things that up until then had been as natural to me as breathing and rigorous aesthetic pruning was necessary in order to take on new concepts and re-evaluate my practice. Prior to 2005, I had begun to draw like a performance artist, always live and sometimes in dodgy situations and there is no doubt that this gave me a buzz. I liked a crowd gathering and sometimes showed off a bit but cared far too much about the sitter and the audience. The subsequent years of not doing it sometimes made me depressed and I felt the lack. My first blog Two Steps Backwards was built on the concern that I no longer drew in any meaningful way. Through the blog process drawing is very much restored but feels different to the before-the-MA drawing, I felt much more humble and if I am honest a bit dry and out of practice and still could not marry up the old enthusiastic show(wo)man me with the academic me.
But something happened yesterday that seems to have changed things, of course not just yesterday, more a chain of events. And then in the middle of Folk Week when my little town of Broadstairs comes alive with music and dancing, I came across a girl and instantly knew that I MUST draw her. She was wearing a costume that could only be described as Jean Paul Gautier does Morris dancing. Such attitude and willingness to model-Corinna, a member of The Wolf’s Head and Vixen Troupe, sat elegantly and with chutzpah on the pavement and I squatted gauchely on the kerb. It-was-fantastic. I could not have cared less who was watching and almost managed not to attach to the outcome, process was everything and time was suspended and all the disparate parts of me reassembled themselves, for an instant, into a coherent whole.
It was also a bit like plate spinning as two lively and wonderfully distracting little girls Rachael and Bella “ferals” of the same troupe, kept asking to be “next.” And so we did the pavement thing again and I scrawled an image in a few minutes-it was like extreme sport. Really.
That was yesterday…24 hours later I am exhausted, after making five drawings in three packed pubs going from tightly self-conscious to abandoned risk taker. The final drawing is of a guy called Ben Mills who I have seen perform many times before (I think this makes a difference), he has an interesting backstory, coming second to Leona Lewis on the X Factor and so is a bit of a legend here. His huge popularity meant that I had to sit on the disgustingly smelly floor of a pub surrounded by dozens of sozzled ladies madly gyrating and occasionally banging me on the head and then making it worse by bending down shouting “SORRY” into my ear.
The drawing undoubtedly looks like him and works as a portrait but possibly because I cared about likeness, less dynamic or fluid than some of the others.
So where is all this going? All my life I have been driven by an inner need to be better, and looked to gurus, Art societies, my Dad, university lecturers and even dinner ladies for approval. In these few drawings I have embraced long outgrown habits (starting with the eyes and working outwards). I am heady with self-imposed freedom and really couldn’t care less whether: it’s in proportion, explores social commentary, adheres to the principles of Sol Lewitt or even if your auntie can paint dewdrops.
And that’s perhaps the point.
