ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [30 December 2008]

Today we went for a morning walk in the woods, the frost was still around and it was calm, before a frantic day of entertaing family guests.

The dog walk has become a significant constant, important and yet routine event in my irregular life.

A strange parrallel time where surprises are found!

# 2 [31 December 2008]

Only to say that driving long distances in the car (something I have to do) is not the same as dog walking but there are similarities. Driving on the motoway provides the driver with the opportunity to mull things over, hold conversations and  practice talking to someone else, and inwardly reflect.

Dog walking provides the walker with total abandonment to free-form think, as there are no likley hazards and the mind goes a little bit past the auto pilot of driving a car. I spend alot of time on auto pilot as making mosaics is the same kind of task that requires some low level awareness.

All of these kinds of time do not satisfy burning creative urges that produce imeadiate results to work with and develop things. All you can do is think about the creative things you want to do, not actually do them, because your body is physically doing something else.

To me, this has been a long term issue.

Tonight I saw a labrador wearing a workmans high viz lime green vest, its owner was wearing a dark parker type coat. 

# 3 [2 January 2009]

A woods walk I think is Cosmo's favouite. Every single minute of these walks are packed with intensity for Cos. Total immersion into a world of doggy instincts and behaviour. These have been latent and dormont since the last walk. Information gathering is what he is doing very effectivly.

Robert Motherwell painted about 150 versions of his 'Elergy to the Spanish Republic'. I love that. An image he worked on repeatedly over alot of his life. Something constant and core to his work.

Now I have walked with Cos alot more than a hundred and fifty times and will probably continue to walk with him for about 3650 more times. So if I did one dog walk drawing a day I would build up quite a body of work? er................whatever! See what I mean about thinking art not doing it?

# 4 [4 January 2009]

What is time based art?

Is it to do with exposure length.

Implies photography, video of a performance piece? Or video of something growing all speeded up like a tulip in 12 seconds? Does it involve computers..say.

The languge of art eh..rubbish. I reckon exposure is the key word.

Is Richard Long walking around a lake chucking a stick and picking up a stone throwing that and then picking up a fox scull etc? Is that time based art? I think it might be...I believe Robert Motherwell's  'Ellergies' are time based as well. I think he painted even more than 150 actually. Are aboriginal patterns depicting 'the dreamtime' which is both past and present in the same picure...wow that is time based or what.

Is me walking along the shore line everyday with Cos and sketching the turbines of the wind farm and creating a map for each walk,for say 30 days... thats 30 maps responding to the landscape we are passing through.

Is that a time based piece of work?

If you throw a pebble hard enough it creates a spark when it hits another pebble or the concrete sea defence wall. You cant see it in the daytime, but if you do at night you can. 

# 5 [5 January 2009]

A classic walk with Cos today it had everything:

A short chat with someone I almost knew from somewhere else. Whose youngest sibling had just been knocked over by a dog!

A chat 5 minutes later with the owners of the dog (called Dylan) who had knocked the child down. Cos and Dylan played high tempo, while we chatted.

That..... I'm a bit lost in the woods feel, as it got dark. (we never get really lost)

Great landscape all around and ideas for developing that art I never do.

While I have been writing this blog I been drawing as well see, and started an interesting little project which sees me doing art for my own creative reasons. Not commissioned no money, just me doing art because I have the time. Now tommorrow is Monday and everyone will be back to work, so the little holiday will be over and I'll be jumping to the paymasters tunes. Secretly I am hoping that it will be too cold in Stoke to install my mosaic. This is a double edged wish, as it would enable me to carry on with my little art games, but no doubt encroach into another of my projects later. Kind of like the congested fixture list that Arsene Wenger complains about every season after Xmas.

# 6 [6 January 2009]

I have bewilderd myself today.

 I created an alphabet which describes these dog walks. Kind of symbols like letters which you could spell out the weeks dogs walks with!

No one exept me could read it or understand the places and events they represent. So why have I done it? I dont know, and I spent a lot of the day reading, trying to place the exercise in some kind of context. This was hopeless.

I have tried again to understand what postmodernism is, or does and can't. Tried to see what was Modern to become Postmodern? 

Consumption and Consumerism, theres a pair with a lot to answer for, I am sure they are involved.

If you were an African tribesman, or a Native American Indian and you wanted to kill a buffalo or wilderbeast or something, that's OK, if you need anything, big or small from nature, you can take it.  But you must give something back to nature in return! 

Reckon nature's been lending to the sub-prime market then!

# 7 [8 January 2009]

So its technology that usually brings us new periods and epochs. Will 'GREEN' technologies, sustainability, carbon neutral and renweable energy sources bring a new age..Post postmodern. Neomodern or Ecomodern.

An age where consumption has no status? Now... its all about how Big is your fridge? You need cars, more than one and big ones, mind. TV's you need them big an'all, all over your house. The further away your holidays the better. Lighting in the garden and if you dont have patio heaters then the neighbours start talking!

So the economy needs us all to buy this stuff, so people have jobs and the world goes round. Growth.

Consumer and consumption, I dont see it changing. Can staus be measured by something else?

It's a rare thing for Cosmo to give ground to other large alpha male dogs, in fact he does'nt (usually it's just the one particular Alsation and once or twice I have had to do my impression of a ref seperating the fighters in a heavyweight boxing match). But today a Giant Shnauzer made him retreat very hastilly. Then Cosmo stood his ground and decided to see what was coming?...and make a stand.....Just some sniffing of the niffy parts of a dogs anatomy. No violence, no noise just a stiff posturing. It was not as bad as I thought it was going to be.  In fact it was not bad at all. I hope Cosmo saw it that way as well.

Perhaps things seem worse than they are, and things will work out just fine.

# 8 [5 February 2009]

I have been away alot in Jan, and missed a fair number of dog walks this month. 

Today I found a paragraph explaining that dogs are watchful, and guard the transition from one world to another.

They are................ and they do.

They are gate keepers and know exactly whats around. If there is anything going on, Cosmo knows about it 24-7.

I have been working on the Isle of Wight in a glass workshop. This was also watched over by a rwotwiler/alsation cross. He guarded a truly amazing world and I worked there with an very interesting guy. It was a world of magic that I enjoyed very much.

I came away thinking that being an artist is actually the best job in the world.

# 9 [10 February 2009]

Very late walk tonight because of the weather. But we went and missed most of the rain.

I look at cosmo and he chills out most of the day. Laying around. He does often lay across internal door ways. One of his favourite places to lay and watch is the porch, he can see everthing from in there.  He really is guarding the threashold of the inside from the outside. If any activity happens in the road he likes to run up to the next threshold which is the garden gate and find out what's occuring. At night he sleeps either on the back door mat or against the front door. This notion of watching and guarding the transition from one world to another has been reinforced in my mind by Cosmo's behaviour patterns.

# 10 [10 February 2009]

I dont have a letter for todays walk, we just went to the woods. I read a sign on a tree explaining that exstensive work was being carried out to fell the many fir/pine type trees and replace them with native ones.

The fir trees are planted very close together and is not so good for wild life and is very dark.

This tall pine tree type landscape brought us to N.America and I was hoping to meet some indians (not ones from the plains, but canadian ones like the Tlingit). They make totem poles from the fir trees. I was a lone character (like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves) roaming the forests and wanted to 'Turn In'jun'.

Totems eh....not spirits for religous worship ...more the quite protector.

See now Rachels got mice and I think they may have been used as totems, cos they are like the spider for Robert the Bruce. They persevere and would provide a good totem for any artist.

Anyway I didnt meet any Indians, only an old woman who had a Jack Russel, who kept quoting Rudyard Kipling works a little too often for my liking.