I’ve got a few projects in my head, some big, some small, some quite realistic, some outrageously ambitious. But that’s where they are, in my head, some are half typed. I need to get something off the ground before I lose the plot.
Tomorrow I MUST finish the half typed, get someone who knows what they are doing to read it (ahem hem, heads up Franny and Julie) and get it sent off. I think, at the moment, even rejection letters would make me feel more like an artist than this airy fairy state of limbo I’m in. I have to get a grip.
Anybody got any experience with applying for funding for a joint English/European project? Point me in the right direction if you can please!
Please turn away if easily offended.
Oh ages and ages ago, there was a discussion about the derogatory connotations that go alongside the term “Local Artist” and even the picture conjured up in my head is of an elderly watercolourist who’s sold a few, and has an exhibition in the library window.
So if I get a job/opportunity within a 20 mile radius of my home, what am I? What do I call myself that doesn’t put this picture in people’s heads?
This is where the problem arises, because my son uttered a phrase the other day, which I love, but it’s so full of arty-bollocksyness we laughed about it for quite some time. But, in the cold light of day, I think I’m going to use it. Talk not of local artists, talk of EMBEDDED CULTURE.
(*sniggering*)
So I’ve come to the conclusion, although I still eschew the arty-bollocks, that it might be useful sometimes… but then maybe that’s what makes the difference? If it’s useful, it’s not bollocks.
Apologies for 3 lots of bollocks in one short post. Oops… that’s 4 now. Bollocks.
I’ve hung “Are You Listening?” up in school. The children loved them, made up stories about what the adult that made the hand marks was saying to the child, searched for the marks, twirled them and spoke to them. I should have shipped in a bunch of children for the assessment!
Seeing them in a child space, rather than an adult space was interesting too, where they could fit the furniture, and the people surrounding them were their peers.
The adults were interested in varying degrees… one of the cleaning ladies said they were “charmingly weird” which I can live with!
Domesticity.
I had forgotten how much of it everyone else was doing.
The washing machine repair man is here. He is miserable, patronising and has an air of smirky resentfulness about him. But what’s he got to complain about? He hasn’t got a houseful of unwashed teenage boy clothes!
I have a long list of household chores to do before I can even start on the art today. I resent it, but conversely I’m vacuuming with relish (messy, I know) as it is a physical reminder of a return to normal, whatever normal happens to be!
Once I’ve caught up, I will have my Tuesdays and Wednesdays to myself to write, read, make, visit, or just slob about with toast looking at facebook and youtube, catching up on my listening.
So if you’ll excuse me, I have to rediscover where we keep the pledge.
Well it’s properly over now. The babies have come home and are shoved in those big blue Ikea bags, waiting for me to find them a home. The song is over, the fat lady sang. I sang all the way home in the car, loudly, you know, in the way that you try to sing loudly at funerals?
So all those half-baked, half-written, half-formed, half-arsed ideas I’ve had need to become fully formed. I need to get them out there, into the big wide world. I need to apply for stuff. Get myself seen. Self-publicise.
So next week I write.
Get myself organised.
Clear my studio/dining room
Start again… today is the first day of….
