ARTISTS TALKING

# 11 [30 April 2009]

The drawing is reaching a completed state. I reach a point where the demands of accurate observation give way to the demands of the drawing. I then feel that I can go with the work rather than struggle with it.

# 10 [23 April 2009]

Drawing. I do it. I'm working on a small drawing about 10in x10in. of some long dead lilies. Looking down. It's very difficult. I wear the difficulty as a criticism of my competence. I travel hopefully but bearing in mind potential disaster. Even the slightest change in my position changes relationships throughout the subject. Sometimes I cannot tell if I have made a mistake, or if the subject really looks like that. It takes me back to teaching. I felt always that the value in learning to draw was to be found in the resultant ability to look, to question, to take nothing for granted. So the child's ultimate ability to describe something 'accurately' was second to his/her growing capacity to challenge and wrestle with preconceptions. Similarly in teachers' relationships with children. Our initial position and our ability to shift and to see anew is vital. 

I have done some more to one of the grey paintings. I was trying to 'whisper' the vase of roses onto the canvas; it is difficult not to shout sometimes when I cannot make my point. The pit of sentimentality threatens. I try to stay away.

# 9 [6 April 2009]

Back to work. There are not enough hours in the day just to deal with distractions!!  I have started a series of smallish paintings  !8 x18in, 22 X 22in and 24 x 24in. Mixing greys again and building textures which will provide a context for the image that joins them. I am thinking  "What you mean is 'backgrounds'... " but I am trying to resist the term since it smacks of formula - slap on a background and then paint an image onto it. I like greys especially when they are the product of colours and perhaps have a tint in them. I like the 'juiciness' of paint. This probably points to some unresolved infantile condition, but I'm reminded of Henry Moore's negative response to the possibility of psychoanalysis, on the grounds that it might remove his need for his work. The therapy of working is enjoyable but must never be allowed to solve the problem.I have the notion of using precise glazed images over the 'backgrounds'. I shall see.

# 8 [17 March 2009]

 Why paint? why not paint? I feel that what I do needs to be purposeful - have some meaning that justifies it. On the other hand, painting makes my mouth water; reason enough perhaps. As a student at Ipswich I had a lecturer named Lawrence Self. He would occasionally show us slides of his work. His work was very tactile. I would go away from his shows itching to paint. (I wish I had told him) This feeling that I am  'indulging' in a pointless pursuit is somehow  a millstone around my neck;pleasure accompanied by guilt is no real pleasure. Even as I type these words I see the nature of my problem in that I try to intellectualise what is not an intellectual pursuit, albeit an intelligent one. In my teaching I used the notion of 'feeling with the eyes' to point to the business of drawing. Such acts can only be trusted; they cannot be explained. I have had a break from my work in recent weeks. My work is in the SHED and I feel a need to get back to the physicality of drawing  I met a man through my exhibition (he was the previous exhibitor at the gallery) named Henry  whose work was a breath of fresh air. Utterly without pretension, it was plain naive statement, untutored and unselfconscious. If ever there was a guru, it is Henry. He wrote poetry also.

# 7 [20 February 2009]

My work has been in the Peter blake Gallery for three weeks now. I have had some favourable comment. I am working on the shed which will house the returned work. I lined it with glass fibre loft insulation and'Shed Boat Shed' mutated into a reference to the felt and fat installations of Joseph Beuys. Being in the unfinished shed transported me to a Beuys installation, which in turn had taken me back to my childhood, playing in haystacks on a farm near my home. The way in which sound and oneself was absorbed in each situation created a powerful sense of part suffocation and part protection.Of course I feel that I know the difference between an artwork and a'functional' artefact, but the possibilities of the everyday niggle away at my understanding. A criterion often quoted in defining a work of art is that it has a level of skill in its creation. But the notion of 'skill' as a qualitative criterion is misplaced. What we have is technique;skill is a measure of the command of technique; technique is applied in the pursuit of a further goal. To differentiate between art objects and other artefacts is in one sense unnecessary; the experience is the defining event. So why paint?

# 6 [2 February 2009]

I have a pathological need for certainty and a disposition to be uncertain. This makes enjoyment a little diffcult and fleeting. My work is on the walls at Dartford Library. I can look at aspects of it and feel satisfied. I guess that the difficulty of drawing is something with which I feed my uncertainty. Knowing when something has run its course comes more easily than knowing whether it has any value. The  notion that matters of taste are subjective and therefore beyond dispute confronts head on the need for judgements to be rational and therefore arguable. Taste without judgement is valueless. I try to undermine my own taste in my work:good taste is potentially the artist's worst enemy. I want the work to be valued, but not necessarily liked.

# 5 [16 January 2009]

That's Christmas done. My blog began as a means of exploring the approach to my exhibition in February. Recently I have been clearing a space in my garden to place a shed in which I shall house my work when it returns from the exhibition. Occasionally, thoughts of ‘Shed, Boat, Shed' drift to mind. In terms of physical work and its satisfactions and tribulations, it is at times difficult to distinguish between making ‘art' and making anything else. The shed, its construction, its function(s), its foundations, its physical context, all have literal and metaphoric possibilities. (THE SHED is becoming a cliché.)  But how do my shed and my art differ? I don't have to worry about the shed in the same way that my artwork concerns me. I feel vulnerable in relation to my artwork and what I say about it. In one sense it must stand without words. I am reading ‘Real Presences' by George Steiner with a dictionary at my side. And at the same time I have in mind something else that was once said to me, that ‘when you're doing the philosophy, never forget the Art. When you're doing the Art, forget the Philosophy.'  I was also reading Tom Duggan's blog in which he mentions the work of Mark McGowan. These various ideas and experiences drift around attached to feelings and bumping into each other. Steiner makes the point that the most appropriate comment on art is other art. Which is getting me closer to what I am thinking about. Simon Starling says that his Shed Boat Shed is ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process'. Tom Duggan wonders whether Mark McGowan's work is ‘art' I wonder whether ‘traditional' artwork such as mine has a place any more. In a sense, painting today is arguably irrelevant repetition of its history through the elevation of style and content over form; it has become a parochial pursuit out of touch with real contemporary issues.  But Simon Starling raises the issue of meaning. Is there a sense in which much art is misplaced literature? And what of the curatorial? My uneducated feeling is sometimes that in our commodified world, the artist and his/her work has become the curator's (the gallery owner's) raw material; the artist has been appropriated by the curator. If I were to have stumbled from a culture devoid of the aesthetic as we know (???) it and bumped into a painting leaning against the wall of a shed, how would I begin to know the difference between them? I think??

# 4 [15 December 2008]

Reading through my  post for 20th Nov I discovered that I had mistakenly written 'proceed' for 'precede'. An embarassing error, but errors open up possibilities . It was once pointed out to me that we do not know what we think until we have spoken. There is a sense in which we step into the dark  ( or the light, even)and then reflect upon it. Painting is like that.

# 3 [20 November 2008]

Often things are begun with excitement and enthusiasm, only to be obscured by whatever else catches the eye. This photograph was taken some years ago. It sums up my fears: it is almost sentimental. The image in black and white refutes the poppy's redness.It was taken after a period of rain. It appeals possibly to my worst tastes. I come to my images by tripping over them almost. I feel a need in my thinking, to justify a lack of 'project'. Contradictory feelings and understandings cloak my readings of others' blogs. If the mark is the thought then the intellectual underpinning of the work must be read from the mark and cannot precede it. Here is a Poppy. 

# 2 [11 November 2008]

Working today on this painting I am aware of the difficulty of seeing. Or to put it another way, the difficulty of accurate rendering. But that is not quite right either, because the act of looking reveals the impossibility of the task. I am constantly aware that what I produce is a compromise between my aspirations and my technical capacities. Images can only approach their objects and never quite meet them.

This work arose from a feeling that I wanted to make a large(ish)38in x60in painting. I like the physicality of painting with a large brush and immediate marks. Mixing paint, in this case grey/black/pink from blues browns and reds and creating an all-over surface of brushmarks was a pleasure in itself. Somewhat self indulgent perhaps. I do not have the confidence and cannot justify leaving what seems merely to be the visual equivalent of a soft drink. I looked at the surface and wanted to intimidate it. The yellow was to be an irreversible gesture. The bowl below arose from previous painting. There is something about the insubstantial nature of transparent glazes that is suggestive of form whilst contradicting it. So I did not want to make a detailed image, but an immanent one. Similarly with the flowers. They are painted with thin layers and bounded by dark line. I struggle with the line. I like tight line. It is the antithesis of gesture but provides me with a similarly physical enjoyment in the making and looking. The difference between elegance and clumsiness can be measured in hairsbreadths, as can that between meaning and nonsense.

So what have I done? I have never come to terms with the strangeness of it all.

My posted images do not appear too be of veyry high quality!!! work in progress I am learning!!