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| 'Cave Wall Study', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 45 cm X 45 cm, 2014 |
I’m well aware
that, of late, this blog has featured plenty of posts about other artists’
work, and precious little about my own.
This is an attempt to redress the balance. Many of the images here show fairly recent
paper-based studies that, hopefully, point the way toward my next period of
concerted painting activity. Before I
get to that, there’s a bit of back-story to fill in. I hope it reads less like ‘excuses, excuses’
and more like an insight into the thought processes many artists might go
through. Some of it is purely to do with
creative dilemmas, and some - with the simple practicalities of juggling amateur
[1.] art practice with the need to keep paying
the bills.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall Study', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 20 cm X 20 cm, 2013 |
At the turn of the year, I wrote about how, creatively, 2013 had been a slightly frustrating year, and how I hoped to forge ahead with a bit more dynamism and, above all, focus, in 2014. Although, I began the New Year with a completed painting, ‘BelgraveGate: Festival Of Lights 1’, any sense of self-congratulation was pretty misplaced. The painting had been shaping up for a while and its completion in the first few hours of 2014 actually represented a missed deadline far more than it heralded a new surge of productivity.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Festival Of Lights 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2014 |
That painting is instructive in quite a useful way, however. Its development reverted to a proven method, involving most of the important decisions, (colour, tonality, composition, etc.), being made in fairly complete sketchbook studies, - then transcribed, relatively verbatim, into the full-scale painting. This method allowed me to feel more productive than ever before in 2011 and 2012, and is mostly a simplistic strategy for avoiding the problem of getting ‘bogged down’ that I’ve sometimes encountered when developing paintings in more organic ways.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2013 |
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall 2', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2013 |
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall 3', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2013 |
That issue had been a feature of last year’s ‘ BelgraveGate: Cave Wall’ sub-series and felt like one of the reasons there was less finished work to show for the year. Those paintings had evolved as a sort of test bed for themselves and each other. Whilst there were plenty of things I like about them, there seemed to be just as many outstanding problems to be solved after their completion too. Also, somehow, they just didn’t seem to represent sufficient return for a summer’s work. Paradoxically, having lived with the more consciously pre-planned ‘Festival Of Lights 1’ for several weeks, I now see a number of defects in it, that may require revision if I can’t reconcile myself with its current state. It seems that neither the pre-planning method or a more open-ended procedure is necessarily a proven recipe for success.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall Studies', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 20 cm X 20 cm, 2014 |
Of course, ‘proven recipes for success’ don’t really come into it, and frankly, ought to be irrelevant within any fully creative practice. Most artists, of whatever stripe, soon learn to be suspicious of comfort zones, and it’s important to accept that problem solving and sticky patches are just part of the deal. The vital thing is to just keep going, at whatever pace you can, utilising whichever approach seems most appropriate, and not get hung up by inflated expectations or self-imposed deadlines. A degree of discipline is essential, but earning from the mistakes and trusting instincts will always trump some set of artificial targets or parameters. The only map worth following is the one you drew this morning, in the light of your latest discoveries.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall Studies', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 20 cm X 20 cm, 2013 |
So. Where does this leave me? Well, progress hasn’t been exactly rapid, but I think that’s for perfectly justifiable reasons, and it looks like things might be about to accelerate as spring arrives. There’s no doubt that all my recent and ongoing gallery visits have eaten up potential working time, but they have also given me masses of food for thought. The fact that so many interesting shows have all come along at once isn’t such a bad problem to have, especially if one allows the new stimuli to percolate naturally, over time, rather than feeling it all demands an immediate response.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall Studies', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 20 cm X 20 cm, 2013 |
Likewise, my recent week away in Cornwall reminded me that it’s OK to have a holiday that is, - just that. I’d mentally listed all sorts of work-related stuff to be getting on with whilst away, relatively little of which actually happened. Instead, the images I collected, and trains of thought I indulged in, were all just part of being there in the moment. They don’t directly apply to the work I have in hand but were all the more valuable for that, representing a valuable opportunity to recharge my batteries and just reflect on things without any pressure to achieve. Free to take the days at my own pace, and revert back to my natural sleep patterns, I returned physically rested and mentally fresher, having cleared my lungs and replenished Vitamin D levels in the process.
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| Belgrave Circle Flyover Demolition, Leicester, March 2014 |
Beyond the obvious elephant in the room, (i.e. the day job), the other significant competitor for my time and attention recently, has been the current demolition work taking place at Leicester’s Belgrave Circle Flyover. I’ll save the details of this for future posts. Suffice it to say; having extended the territory covered by my ‘Belgrave Gate Project’ to include the roundabouts and flyovers at both ends of that road, it became impossible to ignore these dramatic one-time-and-for-all time developments. Just as in the last weeks of 2013, early 2014 has seen numerous weekend and after-work trips ‘down The Gate’ with the cameras, in an attempt to beat the demolition company’s own schedules and deadlines. Further time has been spent subsequently, thawing fingers, drying out and squeezing the resultant images onto various hard drives. It’s fair to say that, mostly, the last few months have been spent collecting material, while it was still there to collect, or simply trying to assess my priorities.
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| Burleys Flyover, Belgrave Gate, Leicester, 2013 |
I always intended 2014 should be mostly about consolidating the various projects started last year and, finally, that process can start in earnest. My immediate intention is to revisit the imagery of the ‘Cave Wall’ paintings and push towards a more coherent distillation of the themes within them. The main problem with the earlier versions was always that I tried to squeeze too many formal elements, layers of meaning and modes of depiction into each image.
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall Study', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 20 cm X 20 cm, 2014 |
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| 'Belgrave Gate: Cave Wall Study', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 45 cm X 45 cm, 2014 |
My proposal is, thus, to push the same source material towards a more coherent, formal mode. Hopefully, the basic idea of a quasi-Paleolithic anthropology implied by contemporary found clues, will acquire greater visual clarity and more room to breathe. This will probably continue via a number of separate panels, with a different emphasis surfacing at different points, as in these studies. There’s enough here to point the way, one painting already under way, and a couple more panels waiting.
Better crack on
then…
I love this....the work and the thoughts on process.
ReplyDeleteI am an amatuer painter (although I did sell a painting to my wife for 20 bucks the other day...that four packs of cigarettes man)...and have become very serious about it in the last four or five months.
I am not very deliberate though. I will sketch something...pin it to the wall and start drawing and painting. I do have some specific ideas for the future and it's interesting to read your thoughts on dealing with prolonged projects.
Mainly I just like the images...fantastic.
Glad you enjoyed it. I spent years feeling like I jwasn't really good enough to make art, but beating myself up for not doing it also. Eventually, I came to realise that just trying is all that really matters. I still feel like I have a long way to go and so much of what I do is pretty clumsy, but also understand that's part of the deal. In fact I never want to stop feeling like that now, - it's the thing that makes me want to make the next one better.
DeleteIn my experience, ideas generate other ideas. You start at whichever point suggests itself on a given day and, if you just keep going, eventually find you've visited all sorts of places you could never had predicted.