Sometimes I wonder if I am slowly going mad, and other times I feel like the descent is gathering pace.
It seems I put myself under a lot of pressure; I think many artists do. Is there an alternative? I wonder how much of my conscious (and subconscious) thought is constantly preoccupied and searching. Hands up if you find yourself in the middle of a conversation, or doing something, and your eye (or your mind’s eye) suddenly gets completely distracted? Is this normal behaviour, or is it just me?
A lot on my mind at the moment.
Curiously, thinking about works as a body of work – before some of the individual pieces have even been conceived – is challenging, in an odd way. I’m not sure that I have ever gone down this road before. I have worked on what I knew beforehand to be a finite series, with a predetermined conclusion, but this is completely different.
I’m talking about a new series, which I fully expect to be a long term project, and specifically my own terms of reference for that. For a while I felt that I was struggling with rationalising the work, when in reality what I was doing was looking to define it in some way, and probably for the benefit of others. Of course I don’t need to do that, but what I did need to do is to order it in my own mind, to understand myself what I am leading to. With that in place I can therefore know what is evolution, and what is merely meandering. My parameters are not complex, in fact deliberately to the contrary. That’s sort of the point. I like the fact that the works will be carefully crafted and follow certain rigorous aesthetics, yet be based on an automatic response to a random thought. That’s it.
