ARTISTS TALKING

# 44 [19 March 2012]

I was lying awake early this morning, I pictured the sun started to make its glow on the horizon, our bodies warmth softening the ache in myself. The ceiling and walls had blended into one gentle infinity and the house quietly made the noises of its sleeping; the fridge humming, the soft creek and crack of the boards as they began to warm, a whole life beginning to expand. Later, in my room, I felt you deeply, the sunlight bleaching out the outside, revealing my fears on the inside and on the blue walls as it came in. Making me squint I saw timelessness, of how we shall one day both be particles in the universe, particles when all has gone. I shivered at the thought of where our memories would be. 

The house knows it all, together with the other houses. What will happen, will the spaces that have existed over time still contain our lives? Will we continue on has one life? Every painting I make reveals my fears, I end up with nothing except faith that we will still have a consciousness in the vacuum. I know never to paint the windows up against the edge of the canvas for risking escape of everything within the borders. Images, words and music offer up our salvation.

I was thinking about how an empty room echoes then soaks up the sounds has it is filled with possessions, how the depth in a mirror measures the same as the real room.

# 43 [14 March 2012]

For three days, on waking and rising from bed, I have looked out of the windows to find there has been no horizon. The view has rendered an edge, a cut off point, where it seems nothing on the other side of it exists, has fallen away and if I was to walk to that edge, I could drop into the mist that is making this effect itself. The mist is no veil, it is an almost opaque curtain drawn across has if drawn across my mind, because for three days now I have had no horizon, my thoughts dropping off into the denseness of grey, the thick soup of colourlessness. If I walk into a silent field on these damp, heavy mornings, find an electricity pylon and stand underneath, I can listen to the sound of the static caused by the wet air, the tower of steel alive and communicating some unknown form of language to something I cannot place; voices in the damp. It is almost a beautiful moment; yourself, the tower, the static sound and nothing else visible because of the mist, a little island of ground pulsing steadily and mesmerisingly. 

This is what it has been like, not being able to complete my thoughts, a kind of lethargy of the mind, my body aches and the energy to move is forcing against the inertia of that lethargy. I have a canvas sitting in my room, for some reason it is quiet, affected by my inability to bring out the life waiting to be revealed. The greyness and my tiredness. 

I'm just waiting for the sun to come out and burn of this curtain. Yet it is funny, because I know what I would usually see in the distance, in the clear air, but it makes me realise even more that there are unknown places existing amongst all of that which I know.  

# 42 [31 December 2011]

So there comes the point when one has to define what is going on in ones practice, especially when the aims are so specific. They never started out specific, but have increasingly gone that way over the last few months as things started to come together in my mind. I have had to ask myself why I am so interested in going back to modernist roots because it has implications on my work as far as todays climate is concerned.

Now the self in modernists art can be directed at some; Pollock, Duchamp, minimalist work for example, but generally surely the idea, the work, generates from the artist? Modernism is self-reflective, different from conceptualism's irony. Modernism, especially in painting, brings attention to the art itself without being prejudiced by subject matter. Now this is where modernism and conceptualism may be in line a little, in that they both require longer attention from the viewer, but the end results are different. Why I think conceptual art lacks is because it requires so much debate about its very self, whereas modernist works allow deeper emotional response and therefore is more universal and brings the viewer back to the more important questions about themselves, the world, and they're relationship within it, while at the same time allowing a more aesthetic and emotional response to art itself. I think there as been too much de-materialisation, anti-aesthetics and sarcasm, the personal lies before.

It is all a process of starting to sift through and accept and reject influences and ideas, to bring the past in line with now. Today, I feel I'm that little further forward.

# 41 [13 December 2011]

It's early morning, sitting here in the lounge the buildings and land outside are still inky black, but the sky is slowly turning from a rich blue with an inner light to tints of green to orange now. Clear ahead, yet there are deep clouds slowly crawling in from the south. In the darkness of the room, the light is still yet to penetrate into me. So, sitting here, I know the stresses and strains are there, but it is time to leave them as background noise. The work is at an edge; clear, concise, feeling like I am heading toward critical mass. A chemical reaction, a biological process where there is death to the old ways and birth to what has been growing. In the silence of the morning I can hear the child. Over the years your work becomes something different, something that ages with maturity, learns and develops, bonds with you in a strange duality of something seperate yet part of yourself. The childish conversations of early years slowly disappear to become deeper. I thought stepping outside would be too exposed, it is, but it was the right thing to do. I found something out there.

# 40 [11 December 2011]

Lately I have been witnessing the reality of what I have been trying to grasp, the inside and outsides as one. The weather has been a real factor in this; stepping out you feel it, coming back you are both comforted from it yet still able to know it's there. The effects of this and three elderly parents needing daily care now, and in many respects now a day to day worry, as meant the stress levels have risen hugely, in turn forcing the time I can get on my work to be intense. I have been able to start tying in the four elements I have in my mind together, clarification coming from the need to focus more to get through these tough times. Life forces one to concentrate, but I admit that it has been a process of it forcing the concentration on me rather than my own ability to do that. Seeing mum in the morning, sorting her emotional and practical needs, nursing home for Linda's father in the afternoon and then on to her mum to do her food, all this is personal and not necessarily needed information, but is crucial to how I adopt my thinking about work. The effect of lack of mobility, strokes, early dementia, seeing all this is making me cope through the relief of my art, it's ability to put me within another world when I need it. More than ever I think of Arcadia. Today I gave in to painting. I though it was not allowing me to find a way, but it was possible to suddenly see the form and so it's working again. The shallow, meaningless forms of my early paintings have now, hopefully, been dispelled. My interest in Modernist relevance is possible throughout all four aspects of my practice and in dealing with finding the metaphysical properties I am attempting to reveal in my interiors and exteriors. It is so hard to see what your after sometimes, only when seeing it in reality does it confirm it's rightness, it's ability to clear some of the fog. Having no large studio space, I have had to try out the paintings in intimate size, not the large scale I anticipate them. But maybe they work as they are? It's a little like Giacometti, close up they still retain distance and looking at the two paintings from the other side of the room, I quite liked the feeling that I could reach out to them but never get close. It depends also on how they fit within the other areas of my practice; being able to work together and being able to hold their own and reflect the other parts if shown in isolation. Overall, there is an air of numbness and discovery. Sometimes the work talks back and illuminates some part of yourself to help you. it's good too, when you get to meet up with a colleague you have not seen for a while, someone informed and knows your work, and they encourage your views, give insights to the work, confirm your concerns. A successful piece of work, a few right words. A time to sit, a little oasis from the huge waves on the reef.

# 39 [29 November 2011]

Issues. Dealing with issues. There are emotional ones and practical ones that are ricocheting around my mind at the moment more intensely than they have done for a long time. Size, colour, method. Size is determined by the fact I have no access to a large studio space, sometimes this constraint forces one to get more strength into the work. Colour, definitely not strong colour but the muted and white/back/greyer side of things with browns of many kinds. Method, this is the hard part. At the moment I am grasping with the possibilities of maybe four elements and while tying them in together is no problem, because they are all about the same search, they are very different. It is justifying this difference.

My life as a whole at the moment is about tying things together, justifying decisions, so life and art very much intensely mixed more so than they would normally be. 

# 38 [27 November 2011]

The groups of people and their establishments were gathered at the head of the river, where they could spread out from the delta's many tributaries. Way downstream, in a room who's wall had fallen away on one side, I was sitting tightly in my chair, the winter sunlight dancing patterns over surfaces and objects, the whole place trapped out of sight by the strong current that resisted any effort to move forward. The only hope of not been washed away entirely was the small spit of land that held me fast, yet I knew not how long it could stay firm. And so with every concentrated day and restless night, Arcadia is a place surrounded by beauty and possibilities overshadowed with events out of my control; storms and sunlight, stillness and currents, life and death.

Blogs are hard, I think to myself people don't want to hear depressing things, trials of other artists lives, problems that are ours to remedy. Yet I am tied to sharing what I suppose should be kept within the pages of my own private journal, because these things are my day to day life as an artist, these things play upon it, make it the tough process it is. The local art scene doesn't suit me much, all the contacts I enjoy are miles away and time does not allow me to travel. I say this because there must be others who are in this situation. It makes you question how hard it is to be involved. I worry about the picture it paints, because I'm quite the opposite to how this all sounds. You have to fight for it.

Life for us at the moment is looking after three parents in three different places because of old age and ill health, all between the two of us. Its extreme choices we have to make. Why am I sharing this? I'm not sure really, I just want to let other artists who struggle to know you can work, it will allow you to find the time because the art is all part of yourself. Life forms who you are and so forms your work.

I appreciate the tone of this blog post, it may well put people off, but sometimes you have to say whats on your mind in the hope somebody will benefit. In the hope somebodies art will benefit.  

# 37 [7 November 2011]

From this week there will be the opportunity to view and follow my new collection of work on a dedicated blog, a small online exhibition if you like.

'Sunrise' is a body of work comprising ten drawings and a film or two. The drawings, as well as being pieces in thir own right, exist as a set of studies that lead up to the main work, the film. I will be placing an introduction, from then on a piece of work each day. The link will be posted on this blog daily.  

# 36 [2 November 2011]

As I stood, the sunrise in front of me, the windows to the room seemed to open up, letting in the sound and voice of the sky, which I new to be there, but audible only to my inner senses. I could not detect the minute by minute changes taking place in the scene before me, yet it was more of my being suddenly aware of the differences in colour and form each time I looked up from my moments of dreaming. The profound affect went deep.

In making drawings for 'Sunrise', I have tried to allow the holes in the pen marks to fill with the ambient content of what I felt, of what was contained in the mornings I have drawn. The nervous tracery of line is put down agitatedly by the frustration of wanting to see and feel everything at once, knowing I cannot. There is a special voice in the horizon with coming winter, deeper, more questioning, making the need to find everything more intense and so filling me with fear of missing the revelations that will allow me get down the work that answers it all. The desperately tight weave made by the silky light that enters the rooms in the hours of dawn and dusk, the low Sun so white and penetrating, scream at me in the teasing hours of shortened daylight.

I thought for a moment that the clocks going back may offer the opportunity to get what I missed the first time, just for one solitary hour, yet I found myself back in the now with the same pen marks on my paper.         

# 35 [29 October 2011]

Ten drawings, two films. 'Sunrise'. The title of my new set of work that has had me thinking very hard about what happens when a piece of work is made that is actually not what one wanted, but somehow has you drawn to it when you might want to reject it. I made a version of the film with ambient sound; simple, slow. Before it I made a version with sound, it disturbed me, or rather had me unsettled in the atmosphere it induced. I have had to keep it, there is no deleting it.

It is so simple, yet the work is now requiring more effort because of this simplicity. There was nothing complicated in the sunrise, nothing that would need more than a casual glance, at least that is what I would first think. But that morning it was different, the morning of that sunrise, the second morning. Again, the simple things in front of me tease and whisper at my inner self, speak so much yet say so little because of their keeping back. I am inticed and made to grasp at what is always a reflection, a fragment, a ray of light in the sky, what is revealed in the split second of sunburst, sensations of truth and fear in the static.

The body of work is everything I want yet everything I turn away from, compelled to look at whilst hiding my eyes.