University Campus Suffolk

I said a few posts ago that I would reflect upon my influences a little. So here goes.

I think, for the sake of keeping this concise, I’ll not go into any great detail here, as I my blog is (from my point of view) meant to be about how my Degree Project is progressing. I do have some a lot of interest in the work of the following artists – all of whom have undoubtedly influenced me in some way over the course of time.

Some have said that artists are meant to plagiarise; that such activities are good for the advancement of creativity. Whether we do so consciously or subconsciously is down to the individual; I would say that I have for a long time done so subconsciously.

For his project, 6ix Souls, the main people/things that have thus far had an impact on it will be illustrated in my following visual posts.

Way back when you do, I did.

This vid from last year has much to do with the foundations of my Degree Show 6ix Souls concept.

We come from the earth, ascend to the heavens & beyond. After death, many would hope to solve the mysteries of life. Ascending to the heavens, we are faced with a huge ball of twine …

Life as a lift.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with my partner about how I communicate. I’ve been thinking about that a great deal lately, since uni life requires much communication – as does running an art gallery (so I’ve found!).

I have always been inherently shy and will tend to be a laboured, almost ponderous thinker. I know the answers to things, but take longer than many to recall them. That’s why I prefer to write things down. The trouble is (so I’ve discovered again recently) whenever I write, I open a stream of consciousness that I enjoy exploring. In blog form, that could be problematic – but I need to do it, as you all will never, ever know what I’m truly working about otherwise.

I have never found it easy to vocalise my concepts, as I have too much going on in my head all the time to find that level of focus in a conversation/presentation/whatever. The noisy thoughts of ‘what if I make a fool of myself’, or the ‘who do I think I am?, or the ‘they’re laughing at you’ one that has haunted me since childhood.

Writing it is then.

As I might have mentioned before – keeping a diary regularly is something I just can’t do. I never have been able to, so never have. Likewise, I have tried to keep blogs before, and they’ve always petered-out after a few entries. My writing normally takes the form of notebooks and scraps of paper containing private notes and sketches for ideas.

It’s nearly 3am again, and I will post more tomorrow – probably some films I have made in the past to help you see how I might approach the waterscreen video idea.

Oh yes – and tonight I watched the atmospheric, scary film ‘Insidious’, which I found had many references to the kind of childhood night terrors that have impacted on my life and (as a result) my art. It has thus reminded me of an installation and film I made in level 5 – entitled ‘Nyctophobia’. I think I have homed in on some ideas for the screen. More on that later …

This next post is the last of my ‘looking back and wondering why I do this stuff’ ones. I wrote it a few days ago. Understanding myself is my only reason to exist. Understanding all of you I will never be able to do, as it’s hard enough working-out ‘me’. Stepping back, with hindsight, I can see why I am here now, doing what I do – and why my Degree Show project is to be (ultimately) about death in many forms. I question death. I question endings. I question the life I’ve had. I question your lives. Here is that post; you don’t have to read it:-

I got myself another little job in the early 90s, and an even bigger studio in a mill by the beautiful River Blackwater – then set-up my own Youth Arts Workshop which gained Arts Council funding. I later responded to an ad in ‘Artists Newsletter’ for ‘an artist to live in a wing of a manor house’, thinking ‘I’ll never get that’. I did – and moved to said place where I lived and worked as an artist for over 2 years – exhibiting with some local ‘young luminaries’. I had another one of those little jobs – I was ‘head-hunted’ by an establishment to re-open the art day-services at a care home for people with learning difficulties.

I applied for an overseas position (in Germany) running art workshops and installing my artworks around a pretty town – I was chosen by the Germans from a shortlist … but that’s another story I won’t bother to tell.

Eventually, my day job became all-powerful, and I took on a bigger role. Creating my own art became less-and-less possible, as time disappeared. I quit after some time – and for a while drew pencil portraits on commission; then went on a Garden Design course – on which I gained a distinction. I thought I could create ‘contemporary fine art gardens’. Soon after starting to design a nice big one called ‘The Time Garden’, I slipped 5 discs and found it impossible. 18 months later, I had major spine surgery.

A while after that, I returned to working within the care industry – and went to study to become a psychiatric nurse – becoming a group worker running art & drama groups.

In the years leading up to attending UCS for this degree, I created a lot of new art – testing my abilities and finding out about my creative self all over again. Almost in a moment of madness, I decided to try to return to study art – and if I’m absolutely honest, it was entirely to network so I could find creative allies in this difficult world of ours. It’s worked, and I’m happy with that.

If sometimes I am a little edgy at having my art ‘marked’ – perhaps all of this will go some way to explaining why. No matter what, I will always be creative. It’s been a very long time since I worried about whether anyone else liked it. It’s my way to try out things that I feel like doing – I suppose that makes me a bit of an ‘outsider artist’; but I’m alright with that. I’m also on the inside too, now …

We are what we did.

6IX Souls is a project about all of the above.

That is why I have posted this.

You didn’t have to read it.

What follows is the next part of my thinking relating to why I came to be the artist I am today – which I’d stored offline a week ago, wondering if I’d post it. I have done. It’s about having confidence in what you do that you appear to find easy, because you have little confidence in anything else. And the consequences of that:-

Always interested in family history, old maps, old buildings, social history, how normal people lived/live, and all the marks these people leave/have left on their world – and in a world that may or may not exist alongside ours – one that we call ‘paranormal’. Scared of the dark as a child, I became fascinated by it, and all the ‘monsters’ lurking there in what may be the imagination. All of this and so much more is my headful of resources from which my art evolves.

Art’s always been my only ‘self-therapy’, and when I can’t practically be making art, I am not right. It has to be made, even if it’s never seen; even if it’s made to be destroyed. I am used to that.

From a childhood wherein I would be constantly making things and drawing things (generally from the imagination) and gazing out of windows in search of a dream that might just take me away from whatever room I was in. How little of that was truly valued, other than to be called ‘a most artistic child’ year-in-year-out, it seemed that creativity became less-and-less important when people assessed my abilities – until, eventually, I really did wonder why I was doing it. Being great at art was nothing in comparison to being a maths genius, so it seemed.

Despite all the constant ‘A’ grades in school for art, the ‘O’ level gave me a ‘B’ – and we all sat the ‘A’ level at college as an aside whilst we were doing our art diploma. 4 weeks effort to get a rather pointless qualification. I gained the top mark in in my year at the end of year one of my art diploma – at which point the penny dropped; I didn’t need to try to be an artist – I just needed to be an artist.

Off I went into conceptual art, and got myself a place at Portsmouth to study a Fine Art Degree. It wasn’t right. Not for me. Not ‘what it said on the tin’. I felt like I wanted to be freely creating, but that the shackles were back on. I became homesick, left, and got myself a little studio and job – and pretty soon found myself thinking about going back to study art – but at Maidstone College of Art, the lecturers were all a bit raucous at my interview – I had traipsed all the way there by bus/train/foot with 2 massive folios and bags of sketchbooks etc., only to be contronted by ‘merry’ (shall we say) lecturers and the last interview of the week. They banged-on about me having a ‘lack of commitment to art’, and rejected me. It was at that point that I decided to never put myself through that again.

I also knew that they were very wrong – of course I was (and remain) very committed to art.