Today’s post could be about the work in the studio, but that would be too depressing. An entire day preparing to make the first of 3 sections of the rubber mould of Phil’s sculpture gone to waste. All my smugness evaporated when the first dirty green leak sprang through the clay walls, and the rubber poured over the table. We stopped the hole and debated whether to carry on, but after a long, tiring day of preparation I wanted to give it another shot. Another leak put an end to that. So back I go tomorrow to do it all over again. Sigh.
Instead, I might as well share something a bit less depressing. I was thinking about the paintings and my new models, and remembered one friend I saw recently in Barbados who had sat for a drawing many years ago. In the intervening years we’d both gotten married, and haven’t had much contact. I thought I’d go looking for that drawing in my old sketchbook and see if it could come out with the other boys.
I struggle with the concept of keeping a sketchbook, especially one for an academic course. To me it’s like showing the working in the margins when you’ve already got the answer because of doing it in your head. I do do lots of preparation and experimenting, but I tend to scatter it here, there and everywhere … so I have to rethink that attitude and go about it properly, because I do feel like I’m missing a trick there, and apart from that, the powers that be want to see the work in the margins. Damned powers.
Looking through my A-Level sketchbook was partly funny and partly sad. After 15 years I could still remember how unhappy I was at times, and some of the stuff in there made me cringe at how melodramatic and overwrought I often was. The first pages seemed to be a totally artificial construction of a step by step sketchbook for the examiner, things stuck in to look like they were leading up to a final piece. Towards the middle the drawings got more personal as my home life unraveled and became complicated. Of course, I know the strange story behind the pictures but you all will have to buy the book. (Names will be changed to protect the guilty.)
I found the drawing of Garvin I was looking for, and no wonder I remembered it; it was the best thing in there. It’s my memory of him, precisely – not just the look, but the feel. I will admit that a lot of what was in the sketchbook was absolutely dire. The best was the work I did for myself; the worst was what I was doing for school. At least flicking through it I got to reconnect with my 17 year old self (what an awful thought), and reassess my current work through that. The subject of the work I make now has always been not just the model, but my relationship with him, and the idea was to have the relationship dictate the image. The paintings I’ve got planned for the next few weeks will probably be more successful at this than the last set.
So looking backwards for a bit, it’s been interesting to see just how much of my art has unconsciously been the same. And it’s interesting how the friends, boyfriends and exes, (they tend to merge, I suppose) have featured over the years. What was the most interesting was just how much I’ve changed, as well as how I haven’t. I’m just overjoyed that I wasn’t making art whilst getting divorced, good grief – I wouldn’t want to have to face a sketchbook with that much drama, not even after another 15 years.
