Back from a wonderful surprise family birthday party for the youngest of my two beautiful daughtersin Salford that started on Friday and continued through Sunday afternoon; I am only just recovering enough to turn my thoughts to my now tidy and organised studio.
While in Salford, we had a walk to the Lowry and looked at the Unseen Lowry show, some interesting drawings, although many of them a little too laboured for my taste. However, it seemed to me that Lowry struggled mightily throughout his life – to keep his art going and with his own sexuality and I felt enormous sympathy for him.
I picked up a brochure for the Whitworth, a gallery that, to my shame, I have never visited. It is due to close for major refurbishments, which look really exciting. The point of this preamble is that, in this brochure, is a drawing, entitled Diary 2007-2008 1 by Pavel Buchler.
I am not familiar with Buchler’s work although I was vaguely aware of his name. Imagine my excitement when I saw this drawing, because my own work relates to it. Whereas Buchler’s drawing is built up by overwriting text, his diary; mine incorporate mark making, and text built up repetetively.
I know that as an artist I can never be completely unique; the acrued knowledge and the visual memories built up over the years of art study and practice mean that is not possible nor desirable. Nor do I feel threatened when I see similarities between my work and that of other artists; it is fascinating and in a way, heartening to find other people reacting to similar concerns and to see common threads both visual and intellectual. My only concern is that I stay true to my own way of expressing my ideas so that my work is never derivative of other artists and I think that I have always achieved that.
Post Script
Since writing the above, I found another blog by Jayne Lloyd, who has recently completed a residency in China exploring script, who then alluded to another artist, (Cathering Wynne-Paton?) Both these artists are also exploring written content or the description of written content in various ways. This proves that we as artists are never working in isolation.
My own brief trip to China in Feb. 2012 had a profound influence on my own work that continues to seep into it in different ways including collaging found text as well as immitating some of the movements observed in the making of Chinese calligraphy.
I am finding it difficult to post images here as they are all too large but images of my work may be found on my other blog:
and in the albums of photographs on my facebook page:
