Well, It Is The Twenty First Century After All

As a persistent late adopter, why would I want to join (seemingly) the rest of the world and acquire an on-line presence for the first time?  And given that’s exactly what I appear to be doing, what possible purpose could this blog serve?  If a huge proportion of the world population now converse and display themselves routinely through the phone lines and the ether and on glowing screens of all shapes and sizes, what on Earth could I show or tell you that you haven’t already seen and heard before?  Well, we can always ask “why?” and I certainly have made a habit of that over the years.  Perhaps sometimes it’s better to ask “why not?” and take the trouble to actually contribute rather than merely observing.  Maybe, for once and at long last, I feel like I too have something that might just be worth showing you and telling you about.  Primarily, it’s because of these paintings I’ve been doing.

Together 1,  Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2011

Like all small kids I always made pictures but then I noticed I was happy to keep going when the other kids got bored and adults started telling me I was quite good at it.  I certainly loved doing it and when I learnt there were people called ‘Artists’ I decided to be one of those and not a Fireman after all, (that was only ever because I liked copying the pictures from my book about fire engines anyway).  I kept doing it and finding out more about it and it became my ambition to go to Art School.  I did that and got my piece of paper to prove it…and then somehow it all got away from me and, for ages, I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to be doing. 

I was lucky enough to find a steady creative job that paid my bills for years, so I hung on to a paintbrush, (and picked up other tools along the way). I made and painted things for shops and museums and theme parks that other people wanted, and learnt a lot of useful technical stuff in the process.  Despite all that, I always had a sense there was something I’d neglected to do and eventually I decided there should be more of the things I wanted made too.  Hence, for over a decade now, I’ve been trying to work out just what they might look like and what they might mean.  I made various guesses that resulted in some finished pieces but never fully convinced me.  Now, for the present at least, I think I might know what I want.  And furthermore, I think I might know enough to tell some other people, (or actually, the rest of the planet, as we’ve already established).

All year I’ve been working on a new series of paintings and loving it and feeling that sometimes I even know how to do it.  I still need a day job but I devote much of my spare time and mental capacity to it and now I remember what it was I should have been doing all along.  I’ve got a small stack of paintings that I’d actually cross a gallery to look at and I want it to become a larger stack as quickly as possible.  Then maybe I'll invite other people to cross a gallery to look at them.  They’re all things that exist purely on their own terms and for the sole reason that I wanted them to, so now it’s time for them to leave the safety of my spare room and try for another life as physical artifacts and/or glowing images out there in the world.  On the brink of my 50^th year, at a time when the 21^st Century seems like a pretty scary place to get old in, I can’t actually think of anything else that makes so much sense to me or that I’d rather be doing with my time.

Inevitably then, a lot of what I post here will be to do with the artworks I make - as I make them.  Also, until there are enough of them to actually fill a room, this is an obvious way for me to let folks see for themselves.  However, I’ve also come to recognise that the whole ‘Artistic Process’ thing soon becomes about how you locate your life within the random complexity of the world and how you try to get a handle on it all on different levels.  Perhaps the ritualised behaviour and routines of producing artworks is actually about creating a formal arena in which all those sensations, observations, emotions and reactions can be processed and rehearsed without the author becoming totally overwhelmed. Maybe, only some of us need to do it to stay happy but, if you were unsure, I'd recommend it.  The finished pieces might be just the physical manifestations of something much bigger, like post-it notes for experience.  For that reason it’s my hope that this blog will end up covering a range of other loosely related topics that seem important at any given time during their creation.  Some of it will be about stuff that feeds into the paintings consciously or subconsciously.  Some of it may be about the cultural or artistic expressions of others.  The rest will be things that just seem important or worthy of comment, posted here in the hope that someone else thinks so too.  I suppose you’ll have to judge for yourself, and maybe let me know…