Threads

It’s About Art

I needed a reminder really, as a way of redirecting and reordering my thinking.

My friend and fellow blogger Stuart Mayes has the sign “It’s About Art” written large and hung in his studio. This is a good idea and I might follow his example to remind myself. I might also print out the photo of myself at the Artist’s Talk afternoon for Five, Six, Pick Up Sticks at the RBSA. Approval and validation are hard to come by in the normal day-to-day run of things. They are important, not everything, but important. So while I am in the studio, away from the public side of my practice, away from exhibitions, performances, open studios and workshops, I think I need a little reminder that the way I go about things is ok. It’s not the way that other people do it, but I do need to be reminded that that is ok too. More than ok.

I keep plugging away. I have had a couple of rejections lately, since the exhibition came down, and I shrug them off with one shoulder, while they sit heavily on the other. I have another couple of submissions in. One is the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, of which I have no expectation, having been rejected by them several times… but if you draw, it is the one to go for really. I suppose. The next will be for the RBSA, external selectors, so that’s a risky thing too. All I can do is put it in and hope. I’m quite good at hope.

The reason I do these things though, I think, is to remind myself I am an artist, that these are the things that professional artists do. It’s a huge investment gamble though. I have spent a fortune on my art practice over the last couple of years, and to be honest, not got much back in terms of the cold hard cash. But I am still doing it. I don’t know that I know how to do much else now. If I sit in my studio drawing, I start to feel removed from everyone, everything. That’s ok for a while, but I feel it isn’t healthy to just lock myself away. So I reach out to other artists. Stuart and I are plotting together, so that feels good. It’s not got to the stage where we are doing anything, but we are talking about it. And it’s about art.

I can never seem to achieve a balance, more of a see-saw… up one minute, down the next. Balance would be good I think.

I am dissatisfied with my drawings at the moment. There’s something niggling at me, but I can’t quite capture it. The attempts frustrate me, and I end up chopping up the drawings, getting rid of the sections that offend… although the ones that offend are often the bits that are getting close, but are clumsy and uncomfortable.

I just need to keep at it… keep pushing at it till it breaks and becomes something else maybe?

A friend asked the other day, after I had posted a photo of my latest drawing on Instagram “What’s it for?” I knew what she meant, as I had mentioned submission dates. But instead of answering that, I chose to go for the gag and answered “It’s a drawing!” Yeah I know, daft.

But the answer really isn’t that easy is it? Yes, of course it’s a drawing. And it’s not “for” anything. It has no practical purpose. But why after all these years do I still find myself struggling to justify my primary occupation? It’s a drawing. I did it because I like drawing and felt compelled to do it. I have ideas about them, of course but not all of those ideas do I feel the need to make public. They have purpose for me. They are simultaneously stimulating and calming. I wrestle with composition, colour and texture… they have to work for me on an aesthetic level. They are like maps of ideas; stories about encounters; they are expressions of my trains of thought. They are also everything and nothing; personal and universal; they are huge and microscopic.

Over time, they change. I use different materials, the textures change, the marks morph over time, they pick up bits of reality as I go along, and absorb, abstract and reiterate.

But I don’t really know what they are for. They are drawings. The process of making it isn’t quite everything, because I am concerned with the aesthetics… but it is a lot.

Large scale drawing is somewhat of an endurance task.

And I’m not Match Fit for it. 

I’m back in the studio as full time as I can be now. I’ve done some explorations and exploratory drawings on smaller paper – about A3. I tried out some different materials and made different marks, and got obsessed with greens. The favourite currently is the one you get mixing my two old favourites, Payne’s grey and yellow ochre. Especially because sometimes they don’t mix, and if left in a jar for a couple of days you get a lovely sediment that sits beautifully on the paper. Anyway, after visiting Ian Andrews in his studio in Aston… he’s another drawer of large abstracts… I came away full of inspiration and a recommendation for a different sort of paper. Which of course I ordered as soon as I got home. It’s called giant size, because it’s 4’x5’ approx, and 400gsm, so is very heavy and robust and is taking whatever I throw at it, including leaving a large puddle sat on it over a couple of days. 

I have been trying to decide whether to use ink or graphite on this delicious ground. I am full of indecision about work lately, but in the end, came down to ink because that’s what I wanted to feel, sliding my old nibs over this glorious paper. I may well decide to use graphite too, but it does make me twitchy as I am a bit of a purist. I am not mixed media. I hummed and hawed over whether I should allow myself to use masking fluid, but then eventually did, because it becomes an absence, not a presence of something different.

I am not Match Fit… I said… the concentration required for a drawing this size is lacking, as is the physical strength to be at it for too long at a time. I’m coming away from it every 20 minutes or so. Which is good for my eyes and joints I’m sure, but I feel I need to immerse myself in it for longer periods to get the best from it. Also, I am full of doubts. From all sorts of directions. 

But I shall persevere… after lunch…

Nothing in one’s art practice is ever really separate is it?

As a sort of detour/tangent I find myself working with Bill and Helen again. Last time the project was called Radio Public, this time Radio Public Library, and with a heritage focus on the library of Brierley Hill in all its guises across a hundred years or so of history. We look at the nearly derelict Carnegie Library and Institute, ripe for redevelopment. We also look at the “modern” 1970s building on the high street currently undergoing refurbishment as part of the programme of investment in the town. While this library is closed, the staff and a few of the most popular shelves and resources have decamped to St Michael’s church on the top of the hill. A strange building to house a library, out of the way of the usual footfall, and burdened with an extra layer of respectful hush. And we work in a room with glass walls, witnessing, but so far not participating until we know the way forward.

In the last project I did find that bits of my practice leaked in, materially, and theoretically, and methodologically… and then it was unexpected. I had thought it would sit separately. This recent iteration, finds me thinking (maybe more appropriately this time?) About words and books and stories. About half way through the session I find myself, slightly tearfully, telling my father’s story/stories. We spoke about the maps of our families’ journeys. I told of how my knowledge of my family tree was  short and stubby, and that I couldn’t go back any further than my own grandparents on either side. Both of my parents were immigrants, my mother from Ireland and my father from Serbia. They had very different lives, but were brought together by circumstance, geography and love in post-war Worcestershire. In the group we talked about a sense of home and belonging. In recent times, after decades of feeling of myself as British, deeply English even… I find that the political attitude towards immigrants recently has made me feel vulnerable, and that my roots don’t go nearly deep enough to combat that feeling, even though I am “safe” here. I am white, I have a hybrid midlands accent, I only speak English, and I have a common culture with many of my peers. If I feel unsettled, how awful must those with darker skin, stranger accents, and a more recent traumatic journey feel? I am a generation removed from that, but still feel it. I wonder do my children feel any of that?

The library, as well as being a repository of stories, fulfils a social function that is difficult to quantify. There are shelves here containing books written in Romanian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian… feel at home… feel a little bit more that you belong…

As I wandered around the church yard, looking again at fallen twigs and trees that are hundreds of years old, and family graves of several generations, I think again of the roots and the rootless. This initially “separate” tangent of collaborative work has once again attached itself to me and my wider practice. 

Suddenly I can start to see the drawing on the scarily large paper… something rooted, or something rootless? A disembodied twig, crunched underfoot? Or one that is still pliable, attached to its tree, in bud, leaf, flower…?

I’ve been thinking this week about my “being” an artist. By which I mean how I do it, how I exist as an artist.

The crucial thing here is the fact that I don’t do it like anyone else does. And that’s not just OK, it’s absolutely the right thing. The problem happens when some people think that artists are all the same, and have to have a perfect linear trajectory that ends up somewhere “important” in order to be valid. The bigger problem happens when artists think this. I am lucky that I have only met one or two of these… they exist but are thankfully rare.

I have come to it slowly, this “being”. I started, faltered, had a big sidestep, returned after decades, then had a big rush. There is no way that I can catch up on those years in terms of my art education, or experience, in the time I have left. But I do have time left to just get on with it from this point. Consequently I have gaps in my knowledge, knowledge that some people think I should have. Sorry… not sorry… but I don’t. If I come across something that interests me, then I will seek it out and try to learn more. But quite often I don’t, because, after writing a note in my sketchbook, I get distracted from the reading and researching and I just want to make. I spent a long time out of the studio doing wonderful things like living my life, having glorious children who are now glorious adults. I only want to get on with what I want to now, and I don’t want to feel I have to do anything, certainly not because of someone else’s expectations! I have a life full of experiences that are only mine, and my art is worked out of that life, it is valid, authentic and true and all mine. Consequently I enjoy meeting other live, working artists that I can converse with. I am less interested in the dead ones.

I have recently had the absolute pleasure and privilege of selecting a group of graduate artists for the exhibition at RBSA. Fifteen artists, all with completely different histories and stories and lives and experiences. Together they are rich and wonderful. Together they are strong because of this diversity.

Along the way one does get rejections, uncomfortable, or even hurtful criticisms, even cruel comments at times, from people who are just unaware, or sadly, aware of the upset their words can cause. The trick is, I have realised at my mature 62 years is to develop a thick skin, to gather around me people who are generous spirits and energy creators, not consumers (Thank you Charles Weston)… and just get on with it. By surrounding myself with the good stuff, I can shake off the less good more easily. I can also see things and people more clearly for what they are, and ignore them, not take it personally… even if the person doing it is doing so deliberately, I can see it as more about them than me.

While I spend the rest of this year recharging myself, I intend to put myself out and actually visit these wonderful people I know…starting with the UK, but I am also saving up to go further.  The trip to America has emboldened me. I shall talk to the live artists while we are all alive… so be warned folks… I’m coming!