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.
