Been busy buzzing from place to place and still have loads to do for Dorset Art Weeks.
Is anyone interested in all this? I have posted another tedious picture of part of a hand holding an envelope near a post box. Whoopee!
The sad thing is that probably nobody will ever buy and thus never see the fine little artwork inside. They certainly won’t unless I manage to get my finger out and set up the ability to purchase them on this site!
I love thunderstorms – especially if you can see lightning – and we have not had a decent one for a while, but I confess that I chickened out and continued with preparations for Dorset Art Weeks instead of picking up a brolly and dashing up the garden to the studio. Twice! So that is part of the reason I am so late posting both the #Letter365 piece and this blog entry.
Preparations for Dorset Art Weeks are progressing slower than hoped, but I did actually put up the #Collage365 wall of 20 nicely framed pieces from the #Collage365 project and have pretty much planned out where things will go – though with some pieces still at the framers there will inevitably be some shifting and jiggling before I am happy.
Well I have got this far without too much trouble so while there may be adventures ahead I am very confident that I will complete the project .
I am very excited by the last few day’s pieces though, as I have said, I am concerned that some may not like or understand them. If you want pictures of fluffy things, portraits, realism, impressionism, boats on water and that kind of thing I’m generally not your man. That is not to say I may not slip in a little sketch of West Bay harbour one day or even do a series of landscapes during this project! But as I say i am very excited by quite a number of the recent pieces: they please my eye and there is a good balance between tension and ease. But what interests me most is the emotional content: I find them surprisingly moving. Of course it could be, like I have hinted, I’m off my trolley! On the other hand they may actually be quite good! Some seem a bit old-fashioned but in a way have a timeless quality. It’s like picking up a jazz album from the fifties or sixties with cool, jazzy graphics on the cover and when you start to play it it seems a bit dated, then interesting, then familiar, then exciting and finally sublime – the whole package is actually timeless. These pieces have got a little of that for me. Again, I may be deluded but the fact that I am excited by what I am doing a fifth of the way in bodes well for finishing the project.
What on earth is it in me and many other people who find joy and beauty in the most unexpected places. There is a group of us on Twitter that share picture of rusty, peeling, rotten things. Some of us tweet pictures of roads, tyremarks, paving stones and chewing gum spots. Part of the task of a visual artist is to look and see and notice on behalf of the rest of the people and make choices which things to say “hey, look at this” about. Yet sometimes I wonder if we are all just a bit demented to be so inordinately excited, awed and moved by the abstract patterns and colours of Nature’s decomposing? Which brings me to today’s #Letter365 piece. When I look at the photos I took of today’s piece I find it incredibly moving. It only took me a short while to make it and something comes up in me about its value and worth because of that. The components and idea had been sitting with me for a few days so with that time included the time it took might be trebled, but it’s still not much. Not like someone Tweeted recently, “you can’t create a piece of art in a day”. Does that mean this piece is not art? What about if I factor in 5 years at art school, years of personal study, a lifetime of considered looking, years of art practice, years of working in design, advertising and graphics? It could be said that this piece took over 60 years to make. Does that make it any the more art? Could it be that it is possible for an artwork, something that moves the guts and stirs the intellect, to be created in an instant and. On the other hand it could be that I’m delusional.
Making art is an odd business. How come I can struggle for ages with an idea that seems really good in my head, but just won’t come together. Is it timing? Materials? How I feel that day? The light? How hungry I am? I don’t think it’s just because it’s a shit idea because sometimes I can work through the problem and other times I can revisit it later and it works well. Today was a struggle until I saw a different possibility and thought “oh that’s nice” and it all came togther like a dream.
Well you have got to ask yourself, after yesterday’s mistake, if I would be so hopeless as to do it again or, knowing me a bit, think “he’s a tricky bugger, he’d do that intentional mistake thing!”
It was nice to do today’s piece. A little time of calm in a maelström of chaos getting ready for Dorset Art Weeks – though words like ready and prepared are no longer likely to have any similarity to the factual state of affairs. I have already decided there are quite a few things that won’t get done. But I picked up 29 framed pictures from the framers today so with the ones I already have and the ones that will be done over/after the weekend there will be something for people to buy!
Another busy day with preparations for Dorset Art Weeks. The decorator is here. I washed the curtains and did some cleaning. I went over to the framers. I did some writing for this project and of course the artwork for today. I have been asked for some more clues so here goes: same materials as yesterday, bold with a Spanish feel!
I know the picture looks much like all the other photos of me putting a letter in the post box but inside the piece I have made is quite different to anything else I have done so far in this project. I’m not sure that i have ever done anything quite in this vein before. Mind you I might not again! I tried playing around with some more things in a similar vein afterwards and couldn’t manage anything with the freshness and vitality of the #Letter365 piece.
I was really upset this morning that after quite a bit of preparatory and layout work on my #Letter365 piece I messed it up. I accidentally damaged the piece in a way I could not remedy. I remember as a child at school being upset once when I spilt paint on an almost completed painting – one that was going to be entered in a competition, It was a painting of a couple of children and a dog playing. My teacher, a wise woman, suggested that I could turn that spill into a tree trunk. It made it a better painting too. I didn’t win the competition. But today’s issue wasn’t one of those things where you can make the mistake into something else. I had just messed it up!
I had other things to attend to and it was quite a lot later that I returned to teh studio to decide what to do. When I looked at the morning’s piece I realised it was rubbish. I had been trying to shoehorn an idea that might work on a larger scale in a different medium into #Letter365. You could say that i was using #Letter365 as a sandbox, being lazy and trying something out rather than concentrating on making a good artwork for the project.
I then went on to make something rather nice, much more in keeping with the nature of the project. And of course it all came together with ease because I wasn’t trying to force it. Even though it required patience, care and precision I didn’t mess it up in any way: it was the right thing.
So although I was upset and frustrated this morning I am now pleased that I messed up, otherwise I would have wasted even more time on something that was never going to work in that format.
Having forgotten the stamp on yesterday’s #Letter365 I thought it only right to pay the fine so I made a special envelope for the payment and dropped it in to Bridport Arts Centre so they would not be out of pocket. Lovely Dee Fenton, who for some unknown reason hates to be photographed, tried to hide behind the envelope but I snapped her when she peeked round the side!
Seems like the postie that delivers to the Arts Centre is on the ball he noticed there was one missing when I popped it in the special box myself.