Threads

In these busy pre-exhibition weeks I have to remind myself that time away from the studio is still time well spent.

I find myself harking back to the time when it actually dawned on me like a really obvious truth… like the four tree trunks that turn out to not be trees but the four legs of a huge monster… my view shifted and I realised that all of the aspects of my life were my practice. I didn’t need to squeeze everything onto the dining table in two hours on a Sunday afternoon. All parts are my practice. I realised this morning I am focussed only on drawing. But actually I could do with stepping out of the studio for the big beast view on life for a while. A deep breath.

I apologise if what I say here becomes a bit unintelligible, but I’m trying to reacquaint myself with the concept. A reminder of who I am.

My practice grows outwards from who I am and so therefore everything around me feeds that, and needs attention.

The factors that made me who I am, in this moment, are directly responsible for my work. These 58 years have fed the work. All of it. Not just the art bits, but the rest of the childhood that wasn’t spent drawing. The woods, the grasses, the fields… the spotty teenager angst… the jobs, college and university, the training, the money and the lack of it. Relationships with my family, friends, boyfriends, then husband, children, home. The teaching I have delivered and received, teachers and students loved and hated. My grey hair and my shape, my politics, my love of cake alongside my giving up of gluten and sugar, my arthritis, and the health of my loved ones. All of this is in my drawing. Love, loss, pain and joy.

All of it.

So I have dragged myself away from a drawing that threatens to suck me in for six hours at a stretch (luxury!)… I look at the green of the July garden, in spectacular full bloom and the slightly overcast sky, and I prepare myself for a Sunday afternoon gig. The anticipation is a thing of joy. I sing my words with my musician friends. The words that came from this life. I have a trepidation about it being a new venue, but it is exciting as well as scary. That fear and excitement is in the drawing too.

I step away from the studio, close the window against forecast rain, unplug everything, lock the door, and drive away.

I move away to feed my soul, ready to give more of it to the paper tomorrow.

Following up from my post on 14th June about worthiness…

I now have the big roll of paper, and I’ve started working with it. A strange thing happened…. as I was drawing there was a thought that followed a line of grey watercolour paint… I felt the need to hide some text along it. On this scale, the text does feel hidden.

So I did.

Suddenly the small collages with text find their place. They made themselves useful and came up trumps. These stolen words become a focus for the work. A way of seeing what’s really there, or what is possibly there, among the obsessively drawn lines and the clouds of watercolour.

Trust the process…

 

People do ask me occasionally about collaborations, as I’ve done a few. Some successful, some not. And I can’t really, even after all this, tell you how to spot a potentially good one, because you don’t know until you actually do it. All I can say is that if you have a bad one, don’t assume that collaboration is not for you. You just haven’t found the right one, or the right way for you to do it… and every time it is different.

All I can say is that it shouldn’t feel like hard work. It shouldn’t feel like you are the one doing all the work, or making the concessions. Equality comes in different guises. It is to do with attitude rather than who does the shopping, or mops the toilets.

I have an upcoming joint show with Bo Jones. For those who haven’t followed this blog religiously, Bo is a fellow artist teacher who I met while doing my MA at Margaret Street, almost ten years ago. We were the only two on the arts and education bit of the course who were there the whole time, so we became initially course companions, and very gradually friends. The friendship, as Bo tells the tale, sealed by me telling him to fuck off. Hilarity ensued!

When the course finished, we were feeling completely bereaved by the loss of it, so made a pact to book a gallery, a year on, and whatever we were doing, fill it with work. That year saw the establishment of a deeper understanding of what it meant for both of us to be artists away from the structure of the academic. We learned a lot. Much like driving after you’ve passed your test. But having a co-pilot in those early days, I now see as a formative, extremely valuable experience. We had a long-distance collaboration for that show, and ever since. It is loose, casual, kind and supportive, but also critical. Having got into the habit of examining and thinking about the other artist’s work, that continues to this day. For the most part it is slow. For the most part it is me sending work to Bo saying “Look! Look! Look!” And Bo tutting and sighing. He is relentless, setting himself year-long projects to post on social media, that I couldn’t begin to embark upon. I once started a month long drawing thing and got to about 12 before just forgetting and couldn’t  be bothered!

So the slowness and long-distance nature of this conversation is useful, allows thinking time. It does have an unreal, unrushed, natural feel to it.

However… we now have a show coming up in August and slow and unrushed is no longer appropriate. We have decisions to be made and stuff to do. So yesterday we had a rare and treasured day together in real-time, real-life, our reality augmented. I had an agenda in a note book. This apparently is hilarious. But we got it done. We looked at work, looked at how to hang it, looked at the gallery, discussed printing needs, designed flyers and wrote blurb… all no doubt to be tweaked at the last minute. We drank tea and coffee, had a bit of a moan about the teaching world that I have left behind, and Bo is still embroiled in. It was a busy day, but still had an easiness about it. The thing about the roles is governed by our situations. It’s in my studio/gallery space, so much of the practical stuff will be for me to do, but also because I’m not teaching, I have the time to do it. Bo has a way of saying things, a way of writing that is possibly more direct than mine. He has a way of cutting through crap, that I can struggle with sometimes. We get there.

This exhibition is a snapshot of a continuing collaboration/conversation about our work, our converging and diverging themes, how they touch, despite the differences in our materials and methods. I think this will make for a vibrant show and I’m excited by the prospect…

Watch this space…

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A moment of pause…
You take a deep breath before diving in…
Check you’re in gear before letting out the clutch…
A brief perch on the edge of the sofa…
A weekend…
The rainy Tuesday when plans go awry…
Sit on the edge of the bed wrapped in a towel, before getting dressed…
Standing by the kettle waiting, staring into the garden…

These moments are either accidental, or built in, so why do we feel guilty when it happens on a slightly larger scale?

I’ve not posted here for a couple of weeks, because I’ve been in a moment of pause…

Waiting doesn’t seem to be a productive, busy thing to do, but it seems (to me) to take up a lot of brain space. I try not to worry or over think, but it tends to happen anyway… those staring out of the kitchen window moments particularly… imagining my way through all potential scenarios… the grateful Oscar acceptance speech, or the grace-in-defeat smile and nod…

To protect oneself it can be wise to think of the alternative route to your goal.

Or a different goal.

Anyway… the point of this is that the moments of pause are nutritional. They build resilience, and further, they build a sense of the anti-fragile.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile)

I have had a certain amount of success with funding. And I’ve had my fair share of failure and rejection too. I have a bit of a bee in the bonnet about artists who pretend they live off their work, and pretend not to have a midnight shelf-stacking job at Asda (or similar). This does nobody any good. Very few of us live off our art. Almost all of us actually gain income from elsewhere. For me, for years it was in education of all sorts, arts and otherwise. Now I’m not teaching (much), I am fortunate to be older, financially stable if strapped for cash quite often. I am a woman of modest requirements, but with an unfortunate expensive paper habit.

My income has come from workshops, sporadic sales and commissions, and the biggest sums have come from The Arts Council (the darlings!), for which I am grateful. But you have to be bloody minded to keep at it.

The next project on my horizon is all about The Tenth Woman. I applied for funding for it last year, thought I had it sussed. ACE thought it over complicated, and once I had stopped swearing and crying and looked at it rationally, so did I. And this is where the Antifragile comes in I suppose. But it takes a strength to do it. I edited, rewrote, and resubmitted it. This actually took months to steel myself to do. I was fragile, but determined. ACE want to give the money out, they HAVE to… so if I want it, if you want it, you have to do it the way they need it done. I know there are blips and glitches with the process, ffs, THEY know it too! But it has to be done. They will help if you ask. Asking can be difficult, accessing the access help can actually be a thing, but that’s a different post that others have done elsewhere…

But I was refused again.

I can be a delicate little flower, but I can also be tough, thick-skinned and I like to think I have insight, and that I conduct myself professionally. A certain detachment is required: they didn’t reject me or the artwork, they rejected the way that I had written the application, in light of all the others on the table at the same time. And they told me why.

So this week I have resubmitted with that information in mind. I know this is a good project, and they actually told me they liked its “innovative artistic outcomes” but one part of the form was weaker. So I dusted myself off, rewrote that bit, and resubmitted. And now I wait with baited breath again. 

I’m writing it here because I think acknowledging failure is a good thing. That’s where the learning happens. If they say yes this time, it will be because I’ve worked bloody hard to get it. For weeks. And if some bloody idiot tells me “oh you’re really lucky!” I might actually beat them.

So now I have a six-week moment of pause…

But it’s ok, because I sold some work that enabled me to order another roll of big posh paper!

If it fails again, I will cry again.

Put the kettle on, and stare out of the window.

We are all driven by our circumstances…

We might use blue paint because we have run out of red.

We might use cereal boxes because we have run out of paper.

We cut up old clothes that don’t fit us any more because we can’t afford new fabric.

We might use an old tree trunk because we can’t afford marble…

And so on…

I often wonder if I was really rich, what would my work look like?

Or even if I would be an artist at all? Because frankly it’s hard work.

I am constantly questioning my choices.

This week is another weird one. I’m within 7 days of finding out if another grant application has succeeded or failed. The Trousers of Time… I have entered at the waistband and approach the divide… and I steal analogies from Terry Pratchett.

In the meantime, the money has run out and I can’t afford any more of the expensive paper, so I’m scratting about. In my head I had (three days ago) an idea for another large scale drawing… but somehow the idea has dissolved. Instead, I am cutting up rejected drawings into much smaller, postcard sized pieces and I’m making collages with scraps of fabric (lace motifs mostly), words torn from really crappy paperback novels, and more drawing and the odd bit of extra paint.

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From my side of the table these feel stupid. The occupiers of hands and time. Not noteworthy. But people have said they like them. I have used one or two actually as song prompts. Lyrics developed from other people’s words, selected because they ‘go’ together somehow. A scenario is presented by a poorly constructed phrase, the scene is set, and a verse written.

But they don’t feel worthy because they don’t feel as if they come from a real place.

And I’m struggling with that.

I’m enjoying making them, in a haptic reward kind of way, in that there’s no pressure to produce a thing of meaning. They purposely don’t mean anything because the words have been stripped from their context and launched into something else.

(But words are sneaky aren’t they?)

Visually, I am finding they are creating a bridge between older textile works and my current drawings. They ‘fit’ in that way. There’s a palette, a visual vocabulary that seems familiar, and the songwriting is drawn in too.

But I’m not sure that I like them because they seem… Lazy. Easy. Simple.

Are they just holding a place for the making?

Are they a way of using readily available materials?

Do they look like the result of an Instagram ‘craft’ video?

Am I being an artist snob?

Oh yes.

Undoubtedly.

I feel I have earned the right to be an artist snob. I’ve worked hard at it and I think hard thoughts and I make work that is hard to make.

These small pieces are falling between the cracks and I don’t know what they are. Maybe something useful will emerge from them, but at the moment I’m not seeing it. I like my work to have a bit of bite. I shy away from doing ‘nice’ work. And I think this falls into that category.