My residency at The Muse Gallery

A couple of weeks have gone past since my last post. In that time I’ve finally gotten my head around and chosen from my designs, the specific paper garment pieces + the elongated sketchbook work I mean to produce. It’s taken some time, far longer than I would have predicted, to get to this stage. Though I’d believed I’d make a range of garments and one or more scroll works I’ve just not been able to pin down my starting point, amidst rather too many/diverse possibilities, until now. Phew! What a relief, now that I have the first piece in mind, the rest have fallen into place around/behind it. Now I just need to get on with production! Of course in the mean time I’ve been continuing to draw (portraits) and the development of the active side of things, in relation to the specifics of each piece, is an ongoing process I’ve realised will/must neccessarily be less well defined at the start.

I believe you really can’t control and/or predict everything about the dynamics even of a particular piece, let alone about your over all artistic development, at the get go, it just doesn’t work like that. It is, instead, an organic process with a life of its own; a fact that’s more than a little daunting at times, thrilling at others. Really you can only hope to learn to tame the wilder excesses of the dynamic between your will/objective understanding of what you think you’re trying to achieve and the wishes of each piece itself, as you come to know it. Hopefully sufficiently that is, as to be able to be productive (even innovative) rather than merely chaotic and potentially self-destructive. The length of time this process is taking as regards each individual piece however, is an endless source of surprise, and faint alarm!

It’s challenging working as a resident artist, that is, because the space you’re working in proffers an immediate audience. It’s challenging feeling you haven’t got enough actually done in a day, produced that is, when you know how important it is to also engage with visitors. It’s also challenging when those visitors directly challenge your work. This week I had a long conversation with a local man who told me I had a long way to go in getting across the notion that the individual, ephemeral psyche is worn like a garment. After I’d had a chance to talk him through the thinking informing my work he seemed to see it in a very different light but on initial glance he hadn’t realised anything approximate to my aims and objectives for it. That wouldn’t matter necessarily if he’d gleaned something similarly attractive (or perhaps repulsive even) but his interest had been minor until that point and so today I left the studio questioning, profoundly. Of course there’ve been others who’ve been much more immediately positive but it’s funny how certain voices ring louder in one’s head.