A freshly painted wall

is completely irresistable for me, I have to fill that gaping space. Perhaps that’s why my waistline is so generous, this acute sensitivity to emptiness! Still, there is a reason for all this blutack activity and pressing of new pin holes – I have to sort out some ideas to display some of the years work at the end of course students ’show of work’…

Pages

The joy of the little Doubt books is that they provide an ongoing experimental space, a stash book, and a place to think out loud. No page is ever really finished, it just absorbs more information as time goes on. Some of the pages are getting really interesting now. And some of the things that end up making part of the page surfaces are pretty interesting too. Interesting peculiar maybe…

Taking the red dots to the wall

I am working on a large multiple piece for the end of year exhibition. It is a continuation of the red dot exploration, and is built on recycled table mats – easily obtained, stable and ecofriendly. I’m using acrylics, medium transfers of stolen imagery, collaged found papers and any other material that leaps out of my daily life and grabs me by the throat. Although some of this material is representational and pictorial, the processes I use change and alter these, with luck shifting them into a new state of being. Some of these multiples are coming close to completion now, so they are meeting the wall, to see if they translate from their horizontal beginnings to a vertical existence as finished art work. They are, as all my work is, subject to change.

And on the table beneath, more are beginning to be built.

Digital art…

I’m getting old. I find myself looking at the glossy fantasmagorical results achieved by those adept with photoshop and feeling the irritation mounting. It’s probably just technoenvy, but I cannot help thinking it is just a little too easy to shift a cursor or hit a button to drag an image into an imaginary memory space instead of on a table, with paper, paint, inks and glues. There’s no dirt, no torn edges, no waste piling up on the floor around the feet, no swearing and cursing when you can just ‘undo’ a mistake and return to a previously saved image. And then there’s the thought that I could make art by candlelight – it might even improve it – but without power the digital artist is completely stuffed.

The two Doubt series books are building nicely now, the colours are getting more intense, I’m coming across new text blocks to steal almost daily and they are a joy to play with.

And onward…

I work on several projects at the same time. It’s pure impatience. If I have to wait for a surface to dry, or a glue to take I can get sidetracked into unimportant timewasting activities like housework or surfing the internet. It also helps me break up my physical stance – important when you live with arthritis. Movement is a precious ability, if we don’t use it, we lose it, and I’m fast running out of joints to move. So I have become one of those annoyingly wide focused people with lots of things underway, and few ever finished assignments. On the table at the moment I have more dots in process. These ones are not lightweight paper punch outs, these are Dots with a Capital D for Sit Up and Pay Attention. Accordingly I have set up a little production line and I’m taking my time to build up a really lovely deep surface on these before I even really start work on them. And by deep I mean multiple gesso layers, sanded and sealed, and now I’m adding titanium white acrylic and lots of shine to preserve the brushmarks as the surface builds. The aim is complexity under the eventual final surface. Once again this is all about the paint, the brush, the depth and the edges – food for the senses, while the mind puzzles out the intellectual challenge of each piece. The production line work is pleasingly mindless, it has a beginning, a middle and an end – very restful after a morning spent reading about the whys and wherefores of academic research. The studio looks like this -

So, while each of these disks sits drying and hardening I have started another book, to be made up of the heavy paper drawings I’ve made this year – some of which I’ve shown on this blog over the previous months. Most of those are now randomly cut, scored and folded to make pages. They were double sided drawings, always intended as pages, but the cutting makes that identity real, and as I pull away the remainder of each I feel a tiny pinprick of regret because there is always a price when you alter a finished piece to fit a new purpose. I cannot throw out those left behind pieces. They’ll probably reappear in my submissions to Dale Copeland’s International Collage Exchange next year, something that is already starting to hover in my creative planning mind, it’s always a joy to take part. I had already cut, glued and covered the planned hardcovers for this book, but as I gathered the pages and looked down at them in my hand I’ve decided to make another book format for these, one that has an open binding. The folded inner edges are just too beautiful to hide away in an outer spine. The outer edges are not nearly as beautiful. Yet.

So now I’ll need to delve into my past work folders and find page potential for the set of covers currently drying and pressing under a stack of files. It would appear I have still another book to think about. Funny isn’t it? The way books multiply all by themselves…

The books…

I have two artist books under construction, using papers ‘made’ during this year. These two small journals will now accompany me on my travels over the term break and into next term, acquiring new layers and additions, and with luck will directly reflect in some part the new knowledge and experiences I have gained this Stage Three year at The Learning Connexion. Making them to just this very early stage has re ignited my delight in bookmaking, and I have this itch to make more, but maybe two at a time would be ‘good eating’ as my father would tell me. These might suffer, if there were more to fill, so I will engage ‘discipline’ lever and restrain myself for now.

Finishing School

I have come across the phrase ‘process painting’ recently, in a number of different places, and when that happens I start to pay attention. The phrase appeals to me because it seems to encapsulate a lot of my own painting style and motivations. I paint because I enjoy it. I physically enjoy it, I intellectually enjoy it, and I spiritually enjoy it. I don’t paint pictures. I paint to involve myself in the process of painting itself. And ‘painting’ extends to the wider definition of art making for me, it isn’t limited to applying liquid colour with a brush. Sometimes I paint with glue and stolen or found paper images, sometimes with crayons and environmental textures, sometimes with pen and ink and words. It’s not always on a flat surface, it’s not necessarily precious, it’s as at home on furniture or books or clothing as it is on a canvas. It’s all about the act of painting.

I think these ruminations began with reading a recent post from a fellow student, ruefully expressing his disappointment at the apparent lack of pics of ‘finished work’ from our group on our inhouse school blogs. It made me think. And it made me become aware that I don’t actually finish work – or rather, I very rarely finish work. Sometimes I get a commission, or a request for a specific piece for a specific situation or purpose – and I knuckle down, do the prep, talk it through, make and deliver the finished piece. Even more rarely I reach a point with a piece of work where it simply stops talking back, and I know without hesitation, that it is ‘finished’. I can sell such a piece. And sometimes I collaborate or contribute to a joint project – and those rules are different again. But, when it is purely in my hands I actually rarely finish a painting. It develops layers. A deeply encrusted dense surface, with stratas of worked areas, some totally concealed, some partially revealed, some coloured, changed, altered, removed. The intent changes from session to session, rarely do I carry a disciplined purpose throughout the development of a piece, unless it is an intellectual exploration. The red dots work is such an ‘brain train’ adventure. It’s like a visual mind mapping of a concept my intellect cannot let go off just yet.

But as I work that exercise, I need a counterpoint to the focused intent it requires. That’s where my ‘real’ paintings come from, that other place where dreams and personality traits and habits and rituals are born and sustained. Maybe that’s why I prefer to work in small multiples, why repetition is so much a signature for me. Where process takes over, ever changing, ever adding, ever intriguing.

So I googled ‘process painting’, and found this – http://www.processarts.com/pages/av/video.html which is an interesting visit into an American painting studio, where it would appear, I’d be right at home…

Democratising art

One of the most important shifts that is happening in the 21st century, in the evolution of human art making is (in my opinion) the democratisation of the processes, and the broadening of those previously precious closed shop definitions of exactly what constitutes art. We’re all getting into it. We have art schools now in most larger communities, providing technique, theory, and history tuition to anyone open enough to want it. We have new industries built on this new open and broadening art vista, scrapbooking, journaling, workshopping, textile and ceramics, all old art bases flowering and burgeoning as people seek relief from fast paced technocontrolled lives. We are recognising creativity as not only valuable and marketable, but psychologically essential to our continued well being as individuals and as communities. While this democratisation is taking place there has been that splitting off of what some see as the ‘top’ end where works of art have become commodities, artists are made into rock stars who never have paint on their clothes and where vast wealth circulates among a few.

And, while I’m thinking about all this weirdness humanity is capable of, I’m making postcards at an increasingly untidy work table as the days lengthen, the light gets better and our temperatures rise and I’m blessing my luck at living in a democracy…

For Matt…

This is just acrylic paint and paper collage over a gesso base, straight onto a vinyl banner, then peeled off in long strips. The heat gun stuff is fun, but this is even more interesting. Next step is to try and control the process, ‘decollage’ the paint skin then reapply that to a canvas base, in pieces. Recycling! Cool eh?

The dots aren’t going away

But this version has a lovely japanese aesthetic I think, kind of ‘pared back’ to steal a phrase from a very savvy friend of mine. Tiny things, but lots of texture to keep the eye interested.