ARTISTS TALKING

# 36 [1 July 2010]

I’m the ‘Visiting Artist’ this week at a girls’ school in Gloucestershire, partly working with some of the pupils, and partly working alone on a piece on paper, 7 metres long. The pupils are very lucky, because they have had real animals to work from: various dogs, a barn owl, two tarantulas, and a tortoise. The girls are coming up with some great work, and they’re loving the experience.  As far as my own piece went, I was very anxious for the first couple of days that it wasn’t working, and was dull and predictable - but eventually exasperation took over and once I’d made a few drastic changes (including obliterating a figure that I’d spent hours sweating over) and fought with it a lot, it began to turn around. I ended up with landscape in it too – unheard-of for me. I feel like the week has allowed my practice to move on a bit, as I’d hoped it might but had feared it wouldn’t. More residencies please!

# 35 [15 June 2010]

One of the hardest things when making art is putting aside all thoughts about pleasing one’s audience. Notions of how I imagine a certain type of viewer might react keep creeping into my consciousness as I’m working. I try quite hard to disregard these thoughts, and keep searching for what it is that I am trying to express.  My paintings need to be coherent, and honest, and direct, otherwise what’s the point? Plus, who is this imagined audience? Is it the people at the High Table of the Art World, the major galleries and the funding bodies and those who influence them; or the smaller galleries who take (or might potentially take) my work; or curators and writers; or my fellow artists; or the people who’ve bought my work in the past; or my family and friends? It’s ridiculous to try to work to please any of these, in no small part because in pleasing one set, you probably automatically alienate another!

I painted in the studio today with a huge sense of relief, because yesterday all my precious studio time was taken up with going to east London to collect work that didn’t get into the Threadneedle exhibition. I have to keep brushing away the questions that bubble up in my mind, the ones that go along the lines of ‘Why didn’t they ‘get’ it?’ People look at my work and they must see something different from what I see, there’s clearly something fundamental that somebody (them or me) doesn’t get. Ah well. There’s lots that I just don’t get. Elizabeth Peyton’s work, for example.

Here’s the painting I was working on. I don’t know how close it is to being finished. Could be almost there; could be that I’ll end up obliterating the whole thing... We’ll see. Today, I like it.

# 34 [11 June 2010]

I was invited by the University of the Arts London alumni association to go to my old college, Central St Martin’s, yesterday to make drawings for a project they’re doing called ‘Mapping the Move’. The college will be moving to brand new premises next year, and people have realised that there will be a massive loss involved, namely of the Southampton Row building, which in many ways is quite the loveliest building I know.

So, along with about eight other people I turned up yesterday morning with some drawing things. After a very brief introduction, we were left to go our separate ways within the building. My first visit since I left, I think.  What an experience... I expected to find it interesting, not to be completely overwhelmed, as I was, with great raw gushes of emotion! I don’t even know what it was all about; I think I’ll be musing on this and trying to unpick it all for quite a while.

My time at Central was really mixed. I chose to go there initially because I loved the building, and I wanted to be in the very middle of London. And there was an awareness that my grandfather (who died before I was born) had taught lithography there for a time, so I suppose I felt some kind of sense of familial connection, however tenuous. Oh, and I’d seen one of the tutors on a TV programme about artists, which had impressed me greatly (and in fact he turned out to be probably the only tutor there that I think I ever really got any useful teaching from).

I found myself focusing on small details: stained and cracked corners of beautifully-laid floors, original glass which had gently shifted shape over the decades causing the view of the Sicilian Avenue opposite to meld and shimmer, gracefully curling handles of window fastenings that over the years that had stood many sessions of painting and repainting, the cone-shaped metal pitcher in the etching room covered with layers of dripped straw-hat varnish. And the big, grand statements of architectural splendour: the stone window seats, the vaulted stone ceilings, the elegant windows, the stunning stairwells. I watched students amble around the corridors chatting, just as I had, and mucking about in the computer room. They stood around on landings speaking into their mobile phones and gave every impression of taking the place for granted, just as we had. I think I had felt the building to be a kind of supporting mother, absorbing its children’s expectations and hopes, and it spilled some of them back to me yesterday.

The archive wants to keep all the drawings made. I don’t think much of my little sketches, but I may well work into or from them in some way. As well as drawing, I took a lot of photos on my phone. Why on earth didn’t I take a proper camera - I don’t seem to have a sensible way of getting photos off the phone at the moment, or I’d show you some. I think that sometimes (no, often) a photograph can be a lot better than a drawing, though there’s a lot to be said for going through the process of making a drawing, it really is a unique way of looking and reflecting on what you’re seeing. At one point I became transfixed by a bundle of orange wires streaming through a clumsily knocked soot-black hole on their journey between one room and another, high up in the corner of a hallway. It evoked all sorts of thoughts about the nature of things hidden and exposed, and about changing situations. The wires led to the computer room, which had been the 2^nd year painting studio when I was there.

I felt absolutely drained afterwards.

# 33 [8 June 2010]

I went to a meeting last night which was organised by someone from firstsite (visual arts organisation). The aim of the meeting was to keep artists up-to-date with their plans for developing their artists’ support programme, and to invite comments and suggestions. We heard about a short-residency series in Hastings some years ago, which sounds wonderful... The artists doing these short residencies were expected to do something that would move their practice on in some way, doing something new and different. I found myself daydreaming about what I might come up with, given a few days in such a space... I had a taste of it in December when I was part of a firstsite project called ’15 artists, 15 days’ and found it really did move my practice on; that was just a single day, so imagine a series of four or five days... What would I do? This week I keep having a mental image of paintings/drawings on huge sheets of translucent paper hanging across a space, so that people move between and round them...

One of the unanticipated side-effects of doing this blog has been that I often read the other artists’ blogs too, some of which are really interesting and thought-provoking. I’ve just been reading Judith Alder’s blog this morning, and I’m reminded of how enriching it can be for me as a painter to connect with the work of artists who work in other media. Maybe one day I’ll even find myself collaborating with another artist, imagine that...

Okay, now I’ll head off to the studio to see what happened yesterday in there with ink and charcoal. It seemed to be working at the point when I left it, but looking at it with fresh eyes could be painful. Or exciting, of course – I must keep hopeful!

# 32 [7 June 2010]

 For various reasons I haven’t been in the studio making work this past week, and I miss it.

On Tuesday I drove 23 paintings to south London for a solo exhibition. There was no-one at the gallery to hang the work, and their hanging system is bizarre: lines hanging down from a high rail, to which hooks are attached. Endless fiddling is required to get the lines in the right place, and the pictures level. I hurt my knee recently, and it means that going up and down ladders is not easy at the moment, so I was really glad to be accompanied by Daisy, the current intern from firstsite, whose help was invaluable. This is one way that regional arts organisations can really help artists – just by putting them in touch with people who can assist in practical one-off situations like this. I had a bit of a panic early on because it looked as though I’d brought far too few paintings; but actually an exhibition generally looks better with more space between the works, and it turned out to be just right – phew!

On Thursday I went back for the opening, which wasn’t as well attended as I’d have liked because it turned out the gallery hadn’t sent out personal invitations other than advertising it in their brochure. Moral: be careful where you show, and make sure the gallery does their bit! To be fair, it’s a venue which gets used by a lot of people (so the work will be seen, which is bound to be better than having it stored in the studio) and their commission is low, but I think that in future I’ll be careful to check the details of what a gallery does and doesn’t offer to do.

Actually I think I’m probably just grumpy because I have moved on a long way from most of the work that’s on show in this exhibition, and my concerns and love are now in the body of work I’m currently engaged with.  I’m going to get into the studio now...

# 31 [28 May 2010]

On a whim (meaning: not working on any of the three studio projects I feel I ‘ought’ to be working on...), I thought today I’d try something new: drawing in a concertina-style sketchbook directly from film stills. This was inspired by a video on YouTube of a dance piece called ‘Faun’. The two dancers have extraordinary fluidity and strength to their movements. I also love the sturdy muscularity of their bodies.

My paintings and drawings never usually take photos as a starting-point, but when I went to see Jenny Saville’s reproduction drawings series at Gagosian recently, I felt that she’d probably used photography as a part of the drawing process, and it had worked really well. Saville's work had a sort of true inner muscularity to it, a sort of integrity and authenticity that I don’t often detect when an artist has used a photograph.

Today's work is not to be compared with Saville's, for lots of reasons including the fact that it's on a much, much smaller scale. I'm interested in what I've done though; maybe it's the start of something...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKWXFoLqYeg&feature...

# 30 [26 May 2010]

A long and probably ultimately fruitless day in the studio today, wrestling with the acrylics... How anyone gets it to work is beyond me! Two major issues: (1) trying to get the ‘stuff’ to work, the physicality of it all (‘the alchemy’ as James Elkins might say); (2) the big ongoing struggle which is always so intrinsic to my work: the struggle of working on the edge where a kind of emotive beauty meets something more visceral, raw and edgy. (The kind of emotive beauty I’m thinking about here lies in an appealing face, for example, perhaps with a soft expression.)

Your strength can also be your weakness. In my case, the ability to draw a face in a certain way. The thing is, I do want my work to express aspects of human physicality, imbued with the emotional and (dare I say) spiritual qualities that we can infer when we look at it. On the other hand, there’s the danger of the work being ‘sweet’ and even pretty. I am conscious that I am really working on the edge of sweetness a lot of the time, and this I find invigorating, infuriating and really challenging. Quite often I seem to dramatically visualise it in my mind (remembering school geography lessons) as an arête, a knife-edged ridge. The path meanders, so you have to keep checking you are following the ridge exactly,  being constantly careful not to slither down into sentimentality/prettiness on the one side, or – or what on the other?  Loads of risks there too, ranging from brutishness to blandness to meaningless gesture to you-name-it. The other thing about ‘sweetness’ for me involves colour. The moment you move beyond monochrome black-and-white, you get caught up in people’s assumptions and responses to colour. The vivid magentas I often use – to me they speak of vigour, but to some people it’s prettily pink. And to others, these colours are simply distasteful. (To me too, sometimes! – I loved Thomas Hylander’s and Nick Goss’s subdued limited palettes in their paintings at the Jerwood art space, wondering for the nth time why I didn’t work this way...).

Of course, it’s all really subjective. There will be plenty of people who find my work distasteful because of the types of faces I tend to paint, or the colours I use. And my own views change over time, too. A lot of my past work now appals me... Which is probably as it should be. Keep moving on.

# 29 [25 May 2010]

I went to the Jerwood space yesterday, to hear a panel discussion focussing on opportunities for emerging artists. The panel consisted of Josh Lilley, a gallery owner; Julie Lomax, Head of Visual arts at Arts Council England; David Rayson, Professor of Painting at the RCA; and David Cotterrell, an artist.

 I suppose I mainly wanted to know whether there was anything I ought to know/do that I didn’t already. In respect of that, there probably wasn’t much that came as a surprise. The fact that galleries like to feel they’ve spotted you, not the other way round – people have been telling me that for years! The fact that networking really matters – all the Private Views and stuff like that – ditto (unfortunately, for a shy soul like me).

But what I came away feeling generally encouraged, and glad I’d come all the way up from North Essex. I can’t remember why, but early on the audience was asked for a show of hands, to see how much of the audience would describe themselves as painters – and a large proportion did! I hadn’t expected that at all. I suppose my preconception is that the majority of artists would identify mainly with installation and photography. Does it matter? After all, you could say that if there are lots of other painters out there, it only adds to the competition. But I don’t feel that; I just feel some sense of camaraderie, of a shared endeavour.

All the panellists came across well, I thought. I particularly enjoyed what David Rayson had to say. Such as ‘Live in your own film – do it to such a degree that it becomes a reality’ (he elaborated more on this, but I can’t write that fast, so didn’t get it down on paper). The event was being filmed; we weren’t told what for, but I’m assuming it will go on YouTube or something via A-N.

I had a quick whisk round the Jerwood painting show again; I saw it a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to blog about it, but haven’t yet got around to it. I shall soon.

# 28 [21 May 2010]

A sense of community with other artists is important to me. But I’ve never been someone who is comfortable networking in the traditional way: cosying up to the ‘right’ people at exhibition openings, for example. Which is part of the reason I began writing and reading artist blogs: to get a wider sense of engagement with other artists – especially painters – and an awareness of, and perhaps also dialogue with, what they are doing and who they are as people.

And I want more videos! Ones in which artists speak about their artistic practice and concerns, and which show them at work or at least in their working environment. Thanks to the website of the wonderful Millennium gallery in St Ives I discovered a beautiful little film by Stuart Lansdowne about Naomi Frears; really worth watching. If anyone reading this knows of other short films about contemporary artists, please let me know. Surely, there must be loads out there, but I can’t seem to find them.

 http://www.millenniumgallery.co.uk/naomifrears/interview.htm

# 27 [17 May 2010]

I had a wonderful day of gallery-hopping in London with a painter friend on Saturday. We went to a lot of shows; the ones that resonated most with me were Phyllida Barlow at the Serpentine, Angela de la Cruz at Camden Arts Centre, Jenny Saville’s ‘Reproduction Drawings’ series at Gagosian, and Audrey Reynolds at Arcade. I’d never even heard of Audrey Reynolds before. As my friend said, ‘she really is a painter’s painter’. I loved the work and I also loved the piece that Jonathan Griffin wrote accompany the show. He writes beautifully about stains: ‘there is something reassuring about the indelibility of a stain. It is an index of an event that refuses to budge, a memory that promises to hold fast until we choose to discard it, along with the surface it’s anchored in. It is also personal: a stain belongs, by and large, in private and indoors’. Reynolds’ work has a quiet, delicate lightness of touch that stays in the mind for a long time. She also makes me think again about trying different supports, such as wood (perversely, since I have so many fresh new canvases stacked up in the studio!), and different media, such as household paint.

http://www.arcadefinearts.com/