This image is from way back when I was preparing for my Degree Show. It didn’t get into the show eventually, but now seems appropriate to illustrate a point. I feel as though I am drowning in technology and intellectual soul-searching. Now on the MA course, which is a huge step up in critical thinking and analysing of concepts, I am trying to blog about all this. I seemed to have hit a brick wall on how to proceed and on asking one of my tutors for advice on the blogging angle, was told to refer back to my first blog on a-n. Good advice.
On re-reading my original blog, what struck me was the unconsciousness and freshness of my thoughts. Ideas can become so contorted and pretensious that they cease to have meaning or anything relevant to say. Back then I was completely new to blogging but now I’ve joined Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, WordPress and have a website. It’s all too much to keep up with.
With so many places to write about art there’s hardly enough time left to make art.
For most of my life I’ve tried to please other people in what I do…my parents, my teachers, friends and family. But this time, I’ve given up trying to please or fit in with expectations in my painting. I’m not trying to ‘go abstract’ remain ‘figurative’, or meet any criteria. These two paintings are just to please me, to express a thought, a memory which came to me out of the blue. One of the paintings is an older one which I’ve reworked. The other was sort of connected when I began it and then just morphed into itself. Maybe it’s finished or maybe not but it’ll do for now. Considering when a painting is finished is an interesting idea and worth following up.
facebook and Twitter can be such time wasters but occasionally it all seems worthwhile. I came across a great interview with Ian McKeever which someone had recommended http://bcove.me/2059jrq6 Hope that’s a link – I don’t understand links??? Anyway the clip was very enlightening. Basically he is not interested in making pictorial or figurative works but takes inspiration from them all the time. The viewer should be engulfed by a painting and make his/her own interpretation of it. A painting should suck you in and then push you away. Think I understand. These two paintings are about the same thing but I wonder if the viewer can understand this? Does it matter? Which one is the most successful?
On a wild windswept day I drove to Margate to see the exhibition by Rose Wylie. I had read good things about this but honestly couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. The best thing there was a lovely sensitive portrait of Wylie by Felicity Allen. Allen has been artist in residence and made lots of watercolour portraits of women artists who came and sat for her at Turner Contemporary. Inspired by this and by recent writing in my reflective journal for UCS I began an oil painting of myself aged 5 and it became a double portrait to include myself today.
