Selected Interruptions

David Hockney at the RA surprised me. I was fortunate to go with the Leighton Project students who I work with through Action Space. We had such a great day thanks to the RA running access workshops. The exhibition was packed making it hard to negotiate space to work with students with but on the whole everyone was very accommodating for the short time we spent in the gallery.

The amount of paintings on show is overwhelming and I was pleased that the workshop organisers focused on just four works to make the day manageable.

The overload of colour that Hockney works with is joyous and for a grey January day truly uplifting. I enjoyed seeing the Californian landscapes in comparison to those in Yorkshire.

Hockney’s delight in the landscape comes across. His time spent working in and looking at his surrounding landscapes is detailed in the changes in season and perspectives captured on the canvas, prints and video work. I think his work encourages us to look at and appreciate our landscapes in more detail and in a different way. We all see places and colours so differently and Hockney is celebrating this and challenging our preconceptions in his work.

Hockney acknowledges how much our memory and experiences influences our vision and therefore we see and interpret the world in our unique way.

“We see with memory. My memory is different from yours, so if we are both standing in the same place we’re not quite seeing the same thing. Different individuals have different memories; therefore other elements are playing a part. Whether you have been in a place before will affect you, and how well you know it. There is no objective vision ever – ever.’ (Hockney 2009 in interview with Martin Gayford, RA)



The title of this blog ‘Artist Interruptions’ provides a space for exactly that. Words, thoughts, images, encounters that interrupt the ‘day to day’ and on the whole help feed my creative practice. But life is full of interruptions. We frequently think we are going on one course then an event, a meeting, something unexpected sends us down a new path, opens up a new line of enquiry or raises an awareness of something we had never thought about.

Recently I have had to face personal challenges that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and I know more are to come. They are part of life and that bit life that is part of getting older and facing responsibilities that almost seem inevitable. These challenges have certainly interrupted my day to day life, my art practice and my sleep.

I don’t wish to write about the details of my personal challenges but I do feel the need to write about how I have woken up to the incredible importance for a society to have access to health care.

I have been fortunate to experience recently the mechanisms of the National Health Service at its best. I have witnessed the connectivity of health and care services and have been impressed with the response and the level of care provided. I have also been incredibly grateful to have access to professional people that know what to do and can give good clear advice. I know at times services can fail in the NHS, there are plenty of stories in the press about this, but when it works it works so well and I am now aware of the need to acknowledge this.

I am conscious that as I type mechanisms are in place to cut the budget for the NHS and privatise part of it. I would hate to see any of the services that I have experienced cut or even made chargeable. If there was additional bureaucracy in applying for these services then that concerns me that the speed and efficiency of the delivery of the service would be effected and there would be less access to well trained and professional persons, particularly for the people that need them most.

In addition the level of care provided by the NHS has meant that myself and members of my family can stay employed. We are not trained carers and could not do the job that the professionals are providing to the same standard. By enabling us to keep working in the jobs that we are good at / trained for means that we continue to pay tax which in effect (should) support public services.

It all makes sense and I will very much be supporting our health care workers and advocating for no cuts to our essential services.

I know I am probably writing to a supportive readership and this may not be the right forum for this discussion. But art and life are often not separate and it is the interruptions that eventually feed the creativity.

I felt the need to acknowledge the advances that our society have made and the benefits of well structured social system which we so often take for granted and I want to express my gratitude to the dedicated staff that are made available through this complex and integrated system. Long may the NHS continue, develop and flourish.