Threads

Right.

Enough of this.

I’m getting on my own nerves again.

All this navel-gazing arty bollocks.

Just get on with the work woman.

What a whinger!

A certain amount of introspection and self-examination is good, provides insight and clarity.

Then it becomes a pain, debilitating, strangling, confining, stultifying.

I need to count my blessings, of which there are many, and get out there and just bloody do it.

Still thinking about my life as an artist. And also thinking about a friend’s words that 24/7 art would send him to the madhouse. I think I’d like to give it a go, take that risk. It won’t happen anytime very soon, but I’ve started to think about the possibility seriously. A flexible path to income is the key, so opportunities that crop up can be grasped!

With regard to this end…

A phenomena I have encountered recently, is the Artist’s Lie. When it comes to talking among ourselves, we shouldn’t do this, it is misleading. The Artist’s Lie is that thing where you are led to believe a person is supporting themselves SOLELY through their art. The Arts Council et al, and successful sales are paying their mortgage. BUT when you get down to the nitty gritty, they drop into the conversation they are lecturing, working in galleries, doing admin work for the local authority, or shelf stacking under cover of darkness at the weekends. Be honest folks please, don’t perpetuate the myth. We need to have an “income stream” and yes, it would be amazing if it was all totally related to our art. But it more often than not isn’t the case. Yes, I agree, as discussion evolved from the a-n consultation thingy this week, that we should go out and make our own opportunities, and most of us do, in whatever way we can. But these efforts eat into the time when we could be making. Most of us don’t want to spend our time chasing paper, landlords, plumbers, reading the small print, filling in the forms, and many of us don’t personally have the skills to do so. So we band together in little groups, for support, protection and “Front” that gives us confidence.

The downside of this is The Clique. Isolated little bundles of artists, scared to let other people in on it. Establishing an excluding identity, codifying speech so that only those in the know understand.

What is required is the opposite… the Anti-Clique, or perhaps more pertinently Ante-Clique. Be open, include, welcome, smile, don’t take yourself so seriously, speak plain English.

The Ante-Clique is growing… #anteclique

Join up now.

A vocation

A job

A hobby

A state of mind

Cognitive dissonance…

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance )

The ability to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time.

Sharon commented after my last post about art as a “proper” job. I was going to answer her with another comment, but actually feel it is worth more space…

I know I have discussed this before, on this and other people’s blogs… but I do think it worth revisiting when circumstances change, or you see things from a different perspective.

Is being an artist a vocation?

A job?

A hobby?

A state of mind?

I have an art teaching job, but it doesn’t feel like a vocation, just a job where I can wear what I like and keep my hands dirty.

I know that other people feel very strongly that art teaching is a vocation

I know other people who feel that earning a living as an artist is a vocation

For me… it is a state of mind… I am perhaps very fortunate to have the job I have, where I can teach art, yet in doesn’t impinge too much on my own creativity, as I only do it part time, and as I teach in primary, not secondary school, I don’t have the whole exam scenario to deal with.

A state of mind then.

If I was stacking shelves, driving a van, sweeping streets, cleaning toilets, crunching numbers (god forbid!) or shuffling paper around an office, I would STILL be an artist.

So is this where the cognitive dissonance sets in… should I be paid for having a state of mind?

I believe artists should be paid

I believe artists can’t be paid.

I am who I am, my ideas exist whether someone pays me for them or not, I make them, whether somebody pays me or not.

But I work hard at this, so I deserve a decent wage. But where from? Who from?

If someone wants my services as an artist, they should definitely pay me a decent rate of pay, everyone deserves that don’t they? Absolutely.

But they are not paying me to be an artist really, they are paying me, usually, for something slightly different… they pay me to present my work in a particular way… they pay me to engage the public with my work… they are paying me to lend them my work to display… or they are paying me to teach or share my skills and ideas with others.

If they were paying me to be an artist I would pick the cheque up, and stay here playing with bits of fabric and scissors and scribbling in my sketch book and thinking hard into the wee small hours till I fall asleep in the chair and wake up at 4:37 with a crick in my neck.

You know what?

It’s MY work…

I can do what I damn well please!

(Yes, I am obliged to work on the pix project with Bo, but we’ve got till the end of October for that.)

Other than that, the world is my crustacean of choice (another Terry Pratchett quote – who do I think I am? A 15 year old boy?)

If I want to stop making respectable clothes and stop making quilts and stop everything else in order to stitch the lyrics of a song onto a shirt then I will.

So there!

Oh what a happy bunny I am!

Ok…

Why is stitching different to a drawn line?

Why do I choose to stitch onto these garments, this fabric?

I could write/draw on them couldn’t I? And sometimes I do, in order to keep the stitches from straying, then the drawn line is washed out. I could have printed the words.

Why stitch then?

This is why I bought the book about semiotics, in order to think about (and maybe answer)these questions properly.

I hand stitch the words. People are astonished…”You can programme sewing machines to write now you know!” “Are you mad?” I don’t think I am mad, but… to stitch words with a sewing machine is soulless as far as I’m concerned. Neither can I type poetry. They have to be handwritten… handstitched…

I think it is to do with speed – or rather the lack of it.

I think it is to do with endurance

I think it is to do with patience

I think it is to do with concentration

I think it is to do with repetition

I think it is to do with obsession

It is certainly to do with aesthetics

Sewing by hand shows my audience that I am serious. These words have importance.

What I sew them onto has significance. The garments I choose have personal resonance. I might have worn them, my parents might have worn them. They are, for the most part, natural fibres, not man-made. Personal taste. Sewing onto a crimplene dress, for me, would be unpleasant to do. I would not enjoy it, and would not like the look of what I had made.

Also, I am showing off. I have skill. I know it, I like other people to know it. That too, tells them I’m serious.

(However… using textiles and having a “craft” skill has its down side, presumptions are made about me, and the art, that I try to shake off. I’m clearly giving off my own “signs”.)

What I’m interested in here, with these items of respectability I am stitching, are the signs I’m using. I have said previously that I use the clothes as a shortcut/shorthand. They say things about me, my background, class, gender, taste… so then it lends context instantly to what I stitch on.

But I’m still asking myself, why stitches instead of a drawn line, or a printed mark?

The “I think…” list above could equally apply to those processes.

So what are stitches that a drawn line isn’t?

Stitches go through, become part of.

Stitches make holes.

Stitches can be removed.

Stitches can fix other layers.

Stitches can repair damage.

So the words I stitch become part of the garment, together they become something that wasn’t there before.

The needle affects the garment, it could damage at the same time as it repairs.

The words can be removed, and depending on the fabric, and laundry process, could leave no trace.

Other layers can be attached, obscuring, or adding, emphasising message, adding further signs/messages/meanings.

I think this discussion with myself is helping.

In the joint blog “pix” I will try to discover the significance of the single stitch, in relation to Bo’s single pixel. I’m struggling a bit there…

More reading?