30 July 2010
A long period of silence, but definitely not inactivity.
Loads of freelance work to grip the body and mind, mostly props and painting and some carnival work. The props are Stymphalian Birds, for a show in Chester about the labours of Hercules. They got that right, I made 8 of them.
I especially enjoyed doing the paintings. What is it about easels and frames and galleries that throttles the pleasure of painting ? There’s something playful but purposeful about painting for the theatre. It’s so rewarding because working towards a performance has to be more collaborative, less ego driven. The work ends up less polite and prissy than working for a gallery show.
Strangely all this activity left room for my heart and guts to think at their own pace. Guts and heart are good at asking the why questions, the questions you tell yourself you haven’t the time to ask. To be honest I’ve felt dissatisfied with business as usual since I came back from Skye and Orkney. As my dear friend Bill Brody said :
“I’m tired of doing art that I’m supposed to be doing”.
He heads for the backwoods whenever he needs to think. He’s just back from a two week canoe trip in Beaver Creek Alaska. He’s very good at using the rigour of proper travelling because he has the practical stuff sorted, and keeps working whatever happens. The first thing he does is absorb himself into the silence. This allows the questions to appear at their own pace, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for an answer. It’s been the opposite of the backwoods for me - I’ve been in the studio without a break for nearly two months - crowded, sweaty, dusty and anxious. I love all of it. I particularly love working on things people actually want.
Somehow the pressure of other peoples projects and deadlines means that the deeper bits of me carry on at their own pace without distracting themselves with making ‘Art’.
Art. I really dislike that word. Here we all are, queueing up for the last dance of the hominids. How can making eyeball pleasers be a priority ? How can desperately trying to get some airtime from the chatterati be a sensible job ? The trouble is, I never really got myself to believe that ‘artist’ was a proper job, even though I really wanted to be one. When I was younger (small kids and big mortgage) people who said they were artists either had rich parents or were blokes who talked all the time, drank most if the time and saw their kids intermittently. Or they lied about it and were really teachers. Never felt I belonged there, however much I was drawn to the work.
So I’m liking this theatrical painting. Make the stuff I care about, work fast (it’s later than you think), stick it in front of an audience and don’t blink first. Don’t need to perform, just need to mean it. So now I’m working for a local festival, a bunch of pre Christmas shows (Brighton art fair and Old Fire Engine House gallery in Ely and Open Studios in October).
I’m going to push the colour lithographs, do some more scenic painting and mostly I’m going to follow the stuff that excites me.
(1) 31 July 2010 at 4:57 am
Bill Brody
Well, Doug I’m back from some time spent on Beaver Creek, an officially recognized wild and scenic river. It was wild enough and scenic enough and remote enough so my head got a bit cleared out. I got some decent work done and some more decent work started that relates strongly with the work we did together on Skye. But more than the work and the travel, I got to do some solid thinking about the best of my work before I started plein air landscape, when it was intuitive, hermeneutic, self-referential and awe-inspired by the proximity to death. When the formal relationships were so very clever mixing extreme figure/ground reversals with imagery of sex/death/transfiguration/clouds. It felt so good to be immersed in a kind of painting where not only the imagery but the very process required long uninterrupted weeks of painting. Doing plein air painting on a large scale in the wilderness is somehow like that, being so in the moment, so contingent on the now. In both cases I was very into the work and very unmindful of the “art”. When I was griping about doing what I was supposed to do, I as complaining about the urging to do modestly scaled landscape images with clean and clear colors; with little explicit sub-liminal nudity and sexuality. I don’t enjoy the vapid much and when I am under pressure I have the strong tendency to squirt off in a different direction like a pinched watermelon seed.
(2) 31 July 2010 at 9:18 am
doug
Hey Bill - another bit of shared horizon here, although I sense that the work for both of us is changing. You said
“good to be immersed in a kind of painting where not only the imagery but the very process required long uninterrupted weeks of painting.”
That’s it - what is important is immersion in the process. For you there is the discipline of a physical journey. I’m searching for another kind of immersion as well, Have spent our time since Orkney and Skye trying to pare away the unnecessary stuff as much as I can. Not easy because I relish studio complications so much. Trying to graft the painting and printmaking directly onto drawing rootstock. Here’s the trigger words from my journal : Gather. Concentrate. Simplify. Trust first marks. Speak directly and completely. I’m now on an 6 week run up to a show in Brighton. Time will tell.