A struggle. Whilst working I have a conversation going on in my head. There is a part of my engagement with the work that tries to remain simply visual. Words encroach when I feel satisfied, or question progress. The painting is a kind of conversation.
This painting I am not happy with. It refers back to work that I did as a student. I am continuing with it because I have to, to see where it leads. It is a break with my figurative work, prompted in part by my experiences in trying to exhibit, and by my engagement with this site. I am in a sense going back to a beginning. The work looks laboured. It will not succeed, if ever, until the elements engage energetically, or much of it is shed to leave only what is essential. I don’t mind either way as long as I can move on. Andrew Bryant asked of himself ‘What am I interested in?’ When I feel that there is no more to be done, I have found what I was interested in. Perhaps there are some of us who can answer that question only upon reflection.
I have 3 pieces in the artWorksOpen inaugural Exhibition (see What’s on)
Ian Maslen has work there also. Possibly other subscribers to a-n? The show is restricted to two-dimensional work no larger than 12 inches in its longest dimension. The show is in a relaxed way, competitive. It is a very lively mixture of images. The vibrancy of the show was a surprise to me. It is not often that such variety is exhibited together. The uninhibited nature of much of it shocked me into looking closer at my own work. I shall approach what I do with this experience in mind from now on.
The winners each receive a solo exhibition. The competitive element is at odds with the spirit of the work.
Competition seems to go to the core of our lives. Competition and bidding. But do we celebrate competition and winning not for the truth they reveal, but to sustain an ideology? As a teacher I was set against competition. So much can be lost through the bruising of talent by rejection. Particularly with children, to lose is to be judged insufficient, to be un-recognised. It is here that the damage begins, and lessons are learned about self and others, hierarchies and pecking orders. I felt that to give a child a prize for whatever they achieved was to devalue the achievement that should be celebrated for its own sake. Children learn their place in and through the competitive world. The competitive blows that we take are said to make us stronger, fitter, better. Losing develops good grace. And competition becomes a vice misrecognised as a virtue. Competition has an essentially viral message. The ideology of competition is promoted through the machinations of meritocracy. No merit, no prize. But the delicate, the modest, the quiet, the nascent, strain to be recognised. In this, competition is essentially destructive and corrupting. It exists to cement the rules. Prizes are valued for their scarcity, and control is in the hands of judges. The interface between the making of art (or mathematics, or poetry) and the social arena does not need competition. Sound judgement and thoughtful debate are what are necessary. Competition is a device of the status quo. I entered this competitive show and have entered others. I shall enter more; apart from being a bad loser, I cannot help feeling that we should concentrate upon what really matters?
I went to St Ives last week. I took lots of sea pictures, many of them sunsets. I cannot resist the colours. I am trying to produce some images that are only just recognisable as sunsets by taking the simplest possible shots that in effect are strips of colour. Although sunset images are flogged to death clichés, the light remains a sensuous suffusion of sky land and water. I am pushing the removal of figurative reference as far as possible in some images. Candyfloss colours simultaneously sweeten the eye and corrupt the mind. Looking at the images some are more immediately amenable to ‘abstraction’ than others. There – abstraction – another formulaic cliché. I thought I was simply enjoying colour, and then in the process of writing I discover that I am doing something unthinkable and confessing to my own crime of pastiche. But if there is truth in Andrew Bryant’s proposition that the question is ‘When is art?’ rather than ‘What is art?’ then the pastiche is capable of a paradoxical life.
