The Nearly Morning Pages Every So Often

I'm afraid of committing words to paper. There, I've admitted it. Paper scares me. The computer screen is OK but the paper page is like a blank canvas - once you have violated that purity and positioned yourself on the sublime infininate white space that is it, no going back, no erasing. On a computer, its very very different. You can delete and amend to your heart's content. Re-write, re-frame, save, edit, draft, edit again, read it, swap it around, destroy everything if you like, write it all again, then finally publish. It's a cowards way of writing, really, but its better than nothing!
The computer allows you time, but can remove sponteniety. It does however encourage parallel thinking. Halfway through you can wander off and research a subject or find a replacement word or even world, and get lost in the internet - but the danger to cut and paste other people's ideas is then very present. You may lose yourself along the way.
In "The Artists Way" the emphasis is on the writer/creators own authentic and unedited ideas, and thus writing on paper is crucial. There really is no substitute to unfettered free-association and scribbling. You can write in the lines, in the margins, create your own concrete poetry and have no lines at all. You are not limited to the serial process in this repect, as one line does not necesarrily follow another as in the process of typing. You are present and in the moment but also leave a legacy. It will probably only be a private legacy but it belongs to you. So why should it be any more scary than writing a blog that any Tom Dick or Harriet can see? Its a barmy paradox, is what it is!
And if you dont like what you've written, there's always the shredder or the fireplace, if you really really want to "delete without recovery". But maybe mental recovery depends on the ability to recover lost documents of your existence. Hence writing. It doesn't really matter if its on paper, on screen, as long as its written down - in your own langauge be that alphbetical, musical or visual - that's all that matters. In a world where we are subdued by other people's texts and contexts, where we are assaulted by information and the simulcra (images plastered over images plastered over reality), where we cannot pick the threads out of the ropes around our necks, its even more important to reinforce our own identities with our own texts.

(By the way you might have noticed I haven't used any spellchecking here. Make of that what you will!)

                                          (ceramic scribbles)

Fruits of the Forest/Evanescent Seasons

I have now been in the Forest 1 year, 1 week, and 2 days.
A year ago I was busying myself decorating and gardening and trying to fill the void left by losing everything I had ever known in London. It took me 15 years to finally find a place in the world there, and giving it up was painful. So painful, in fact, that it manifested itself in terrible migraines that lasted for a day or 2 at a time. When I was supposed to be checking what was going on and coming off the moving van, I had to lie down, I prayed for darkness. I had to excuse myself from the relations that had come to help me and my husband, I couldn't bear the busy-ness of it all, and of course no-one excells in busy-ness more than a mother-in-law. It was all too much and I literally felt like my head was going to explode.
For the first week it was like an exciting holiday. We had our best mate down, explored the area, and tried many new beers and food in the pubs. Hub had 10 days off work. We started leisurely then knuckled down. Walls were painted, doggy smelling carpets were ripped out, and expensive cottagy wood furniture was purchased. Then he went back to work, the improvements slowed down, and problems with the house started appearing. The garden was a jungle. The central heating died. The cats got into fights. The contacts I tried to make in community arts dried up. They said they didn't need me after all.
What had this done to my creative output?
It had killed it.
I wanted to make things in the house better. I wanted to find a job. I wanted to feel as comfortable as I did before. I had no energy to create. I didn't know what I wanted to paint but I DID know I didn't want to paint twee landscapes full of bluebells and deer. I felt too urban to belong. All around me were strange accents belonging to even stranger people.
I tried sign-writing for the local steam railway. I was clearly intruding on an old boys club, and it was so cold in the machine room. I didn't feel like celebrating Christmas. I didn't have the heart for it. And the Christmas before, my dear feline friend was suddenly taken from me. It took a trip to the craft centre with my sister and buying a tree and garland there to make it more festive and heartwarming.
But the months dragged on and all I was doing was drawing and rehashing old ideas on pieces of paper, and pathetic attempts at my own style of landscape - so at least I could do something commercial. I had hopes of showing at a London gallery but they changed their mind at the last minute. My work was all packaged up and new work showed no sign of appearing. I was too frightened to work in the barn in case it all had to stop for the builders, and it was damp and had a scary rickety ladder in. I was freezing cold and all I wanted was a warm duvet, the cats, the laptop, and a bottle of good single malt.
I gritted my teeth and tried to get on - I signed up for the Open Studios to give myself some incentive to sort the barn out and make it presentable by July. I had sold a bit of work at a Christmas Craft Fair and that also gave me a little green shoot of confidence. The green shoots were so fragile and not frost proof though, the soil they were growing out of was also cold and barren.
In early spring, when I had decided not to wait for the building work and improvements to the barn and to make some work in the meantime, I took some of my inheritance and bought a kiln. I had no idea what to buy as I'd previously only ever used someone elses, and most of the times they had  done the firings for me. It was scary and exciting. My first firing went unbelievably well and this spurred me on. And, as the Open Studios approached, and I took lots of stored work out of its boxes, I was amazed at the variety of work I seemed to have produced. I even found some ceramics going back to 1994!
I had fallen out with a local artists collective in Gloucester and this had dampened my enthusiasm somewhat. I wanted to paint magpies and birds to sell there and they seemed up for this, and showed interest in my "splat" paintings. But then they decided I had no place there, and one of the artists suddenly started painting birds...
But I did the magpie paintings anyway, my rationale was that I was re-using old canvases, so it didn't matter if I messed them up. I felt detached making them though, as if trying to re-kindle an old relationship that had died due to lack of committment. My lack of skill made me feel guilty, like it was a lack of love.
What started to turn things around was working at the local museum. I put a painting in there as part of a local artists show, I didn't even get to see the other artists displaying there, only their work. The painting was a vibrant, abstract expressionist piece I'd done at Horley in the summer between 2 terms at Brighton. It was a very experimental piece and I'm surprised at the positive responses I got. One woman said she found it hard to tear herself away from it, and kept going back and looking at it. And she was just a volunteer there, not even "very arty" herself. It was wonderful to be able to communicate with this new audience, and a great and pleasing surprise. I volunteered to help with the Big Draw, and from this regular workshops began. Not paid ones, but I got so much good feedback and enthusiasm both from the museum and the public it didn't matter. It helped boost my confidence for the Open Studios. I certainly didn't care whether I sold anything or not from my studio, hoping I might flog a few spotty cats, but I ended up selling 2 paintings for quite a good amount!
I started making some more tentacle pots that I enjoyed making in Battersea. I got myself some outside support. My Mojo was returning! I made bigger and more colourful paintings. I got a page in a glossy brochure advertising my workshops at the museum.
I said goodbye to the splat painting idea by making my final one as loud and pink as it gets, ready to move on with something else. It was time to move on. That series of paintings went out with a bang, but still new followers are liking them, both on the net and in real life.
My work has always explored new areas. It would give an art therapist real food for thought! As I have got stronger as a person, my work has become more delicate. The colours have ceased to dominate the canvas, there is a lot of white space, the calm split by a slight intervention (or scar?), the ceramics has gone from thick and fleshy to thin and delicate, so fragile it looks like it could be destroyed by merely breathing on it. Maybe this is my fragility being dealt with in a literal sense, or maybe it is that I dont need to shout with my creative voice to drown out the other, more contemptuous voices within. Maybe I am becalmed, and the work shows my voice needs only to be a whisper to suggest ideas.
And I have taken up singing again.

Spike and Stripe

A few weeks ago, just before the heavens opened and the wrath of some god poured scorn on our West Country summer, I happened to make the long awaited pilgrimage to Bristol.
I say "pilgrimage" because ever since my foundation year this city has loomed large in my conciousness as a place where urban contemporary art flourishes and that conceptual ideas are explored seriously. I used to read the Fine Art course description in the UWE prospectus and it seemed to be even more serious than Goldsmiths, considered and thoughtful reflections and applications of fine art, and my tutor at Croydon had graduated from there, and he was full of conceptual thought, although he was also full of BS. It sounded to me like an area worth visiting, as I had already visited it psychologically. It had everything I want, urbanity, water, creativity, and of course music. Little boats bobbing up and down in the middle of a city. My idea of heaven.

I did my research and decided what I wanted to visit specifically. I decided for my first trip I would go to Spike Island, as it looked like an interesting setup and reminded me a bit of the Pheonix in Brighton, another collection of artists and spaces. The area itself, on arrival, also reminded me of Hackney Wick: sluggish water, vibrant graffiti, concrete and brick and wildflowers mingling tantalising together.
The show didn't dominate the white space, as large artworks usually tend to do. It almost blended in with the planes, looking almost like a giant doodle, lines blending with lines on a big page, like somebody drawing crosshatched patterns with a set of coloured biros in a modular office cell whilst on the phone to someone tedious. Its a daydreaming kind of work, the nautical ropes and pulleys adding to that dreamlike feeling, in the open space it could just sail away like a yacht on an overcast winters day, on white mirror like water with a huge open blank pale sky. Sail away like a mind not quite on the job.

Yet in all this threadlike tranparency there was a physicality in the work, the heavy frames and the balancing weights, as you walked around them, they hung solidly and almost obstructivley, providing a view in but also obscuring it. The moire pattern was effective in the main where the 2d boxes intersected, this was rendered with mechanical precision. By contrast, the crafted pieces of the work had not quite an accurate construction. Some of the lines of rope in the frames were disturbingly uneven, if this had been a doodle on a page this would be where the pen's fluid ran suddenly thick, or if a graph in a school project, the ruler had been badly placed. It did remind me of when I had to draw bar graphs at school, in graph paper books, with fineliners. I was never very neat.

Looking at the placing of these double-thick lines I couldn't decide whether this was deliberate or a circumstance of construction. However, it was a overall a pleasing effect, the way the lines overlapped as your body and eyes moved about the space, a great game of pereception and proprioception, one that I had tried to do with the coloured gel in my MA projects, but with limited success. What I lacked was clearly ambition, something that this work had in abundance. Ambition, but with quiet confidence.

Transience, Permanence, Function and Space

  

If "a thing of beauty is a joy forever", what is an ugly thing?

Can I justify bringing objects and freshly created artifacts into the world?

It's not like music. Or a live performance.

(or the anonymity of coded magnetic tape

or a shiny naked disc

or 1's and zeros)

Once a song or an act is performed, its over. Its gone.

It hangs in the air, gilded in people's memories, in their subconscious.

But a piece of visual art is there, on the shelf, on the wall, on the plinth.

Then it is either bought and valued or discarded or hidden.

Or destroyed.

Or forgotten about.

It could be shown, shared, or stored.

But it still takes up space.

Obstinately.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

Going through my inbox reveals a variety of artists who promote themselves because they have deep pockets, whether it be a top level advert in an arts website or a self-funded show. Any curatorial sense or talent goes straight out of the window. Its sickening when there are very talented people out there who CANT hire (for example), the Brick Lane Gallery for thousands of pounds for a vanity project, or give a website a big fat fee to have their pathetic painting e-mailed to everyone by Absolutearts (just streaks of blue oil paint that I have done myself and so has everyone else at some point), paying big membership fees to arts organisations and clubs and websites to get top viewing or pay entry fees for competitions while the rest of us are forced to live in the shadows simply because we dont have a rich daddy or a trust fund to help subsidise our hobby! True artists will get ignored while self-important hobby artists who have not scrimped and saved to put themselves through training and pay for materials get all the glory and exposure.
Right now I am using the last of my savings paying for a studio because I cant work in my house any more, its a necessity not a luxury, and I am splitting the rent with other artists. My community arts projects have had their funding cut so I am getting no paid work at the moment and therefore cant fund any shows or attempt any expensive work. Right now I'm having to ask my husband to buy me a roll of canvas.
I'm not failing to be successful because I'm no good at what I do (although I admit I have a lot of developing to do), but because I dont have unlimited supplies of cash to bolster my ego and my prescence...

Watered down ambition

Just on the offchance, I entered some of my urban watercolours for a couple of comps. Now, I dont usually do competitions, because I strongly feel they do little to encourage innovation, usually artists just produce things they think will appeal to the judges. I also dont have a huge amount of self-confidence or influential friends.
Anyway, in the first instance, art competitions being bland and uninspiring, I was right. My work did not get selected for the Royal Watercolour Society shortlist. On the shortlist was a predictable amount of flowers, landscapes, and abstract "autobiographical" scrawls. One or two interesting portaits. Certainly nothing to rock the establishment! What did I expect?
A show that gave me a slightly more positive reaction, at least to start with, was "Pumped Up Kicks" by the Young Curators in Leeds. They were very enthusiastic when I sent them some jpegs, saying it was just what they were looking for, and would let me know. This was some weeks ago, then yesterday I got another e-mail saying they were overwhelmed with work and mine didn't fit in. "Didn't fit in". Story of my life!
I bet the work there is pretty predictable too.. let me see, grainy photographs of yoof in streets, some tag graffiti.. I'll have a look online but I bet it will all look like a First Year BA show.
I dont mean to be bitter and twisted, in fact I'm quite chirpy today, but it all gets so tedious when you try to get in there with something a bit different that you believe in and worked hard with.

The Tulip Bowl and the Heart

In the opening of Das Kapital, Marx makes the observation that within the capitalist mode of production we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they're actually useful for, but we instead recognize them based on their value in the market.

I have now made several of these concept pots/objects. I viewed them as art for sure, a kind of three dimensional poetry, so got quite miffed when an art teacher friend of mine said "Oh, are they tulip bowls?", the inference being that I had made them for no other ends than to hold flowers. Now, not only is that an affront, but I cant possibly see why something so ugly and visceral could be seen to contain beautiful flowers. She went on to explain that tulip bowls were very ornate and became a whole phenomenon of their own, because of the love of tulips and the obsession that Europe had with them, owning and showing off new varieties of both plant and plant holder. The flower itself was such a rare and sought after commodity that it had become something of a status symbol, so by extension the tulip bowl had also become a wanted and prized item.

I pondered over this a while, and for some time still smarted at the thought that I was a mere artisan, and not a fine artist, simply throwing out mindless empty vessels that most people assumed would have to be filled. Incomplete objects, primitive ones, products off an assembly line to be used and abused. Not items to be looked into in any great detail, not items worthy of a back story or a theory.

However, with art being a commodity, and this not being particular to Post Modern times, twas always thus since Renaissance times and before where the rich would commission or collect, I reasoned with myself that an artisan product was nothing to be ashamed of, and that it was a democratised object. It had Usefulness, because it was Crafted, and was not a Commodity because it was Art. It had some function so therefore it could not be evaluated purely on its artistic quality and therefore monetised as so valuable and rare an object. I shy away from associating myself from Socialism but there it was, an object of mud, almost Arte Povera but as common as a chipped mug; and since I dont sell paintings and tend to work with community arts groups for a pittance, it seems I have fallen into socialism without even trying!

It would be nice to command a high price for an object that I have not only made with my hands but made with my intellect, and be revered and sought after and my work grace the coolest gallery walls and plinths, but in a world so twisted that even staple foodstuff like wheat and corn are traded as commodities, do I really want to fuel a market and become part of this vampiric overblown captalism? At a time where "We are the 99" rallies are popping up all over the place, should I really be yearning to be part of a system that now seems very old hat and rotten by an ever increasing number of ordinary people?

But deep down, Commodity vs Usefulness is not an arguement. Its what I can make that comes from the heart that matters.