Well I am going to have to give a clue or two to explain the title! Having opened my house as a gallery for Dorset Art Weeks I have not been able to fit my #Letter365 piece into the day so I am unable to start till after we close. So with limited time available why do I choose something which involves a drying time – a drying time much longer than I thought! And just in case it still had a residual wetness I needed to think about packing it carefully and it happens to be thicker than average so I had to work out a compromise so that it would still be less than 5mm thick and go through the Post Office slot and not cost me more than a normal first class stamp.
Anyway, I still popped it in the box around 10.30pm (serenaded by a tawny owl) so all’s well.
No75 goes in the box – nothing exciting about that then!
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!
No73 goes in the box making it 20% of my task completed already
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.
Hand-written address and a nice film stamp for No71
Today’s piece gave me cause for a lot of thought about being true to myself and having the courage to stick to the visual statement I am moved or minded to make. There was something in me wanting to make this piece more accessible to a wider audience even though it was not the right thing. I wonder if Barnet Newman ever thought of sticking a little flower in on of his vast expanses of colour? Did Malevich ever consider a smiling face to make his chilling severity more friendly? Did Mondrian explore the possibility of a cute dog in one of his grids? I doubt it very much. So how come I am worrying that people may find my work hard to grasp or shallow or whatever? So then I worry if it’s derivative or of its time or out of fashion! I worry should I create things in the hope that people like them? It is certainly pleasant and reassuring when people like my work but I don’t always understand why.
Drawing from my sketchbook 3 May 2014
This piece to the right has been favourited and retweeted on Twitter much more than I could imagine. I have no idea what it is about. Moreover I have no idea what it is that people like about it. There are elements in it that I incorporate into my work generally but broadly it is not really my style – but maybe these sketchbook doodles are what I should be doing more of? Should I make work like this and see if people approve? I have remembered that I have created a large piece which has some of the feel of this one. I must photograph it and post it to see what reaction it elicits!
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.
No69 goes in the box with the right number, a stamp and a mistake
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 late night posting for #Letter365 as No66 gets posted at night
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.
I know, after 2 whole months, a sixth of this journey you would think I could do better, but frankly I am so busy with preparations for Dorset Art Weeks (just 17 days 14 hours 22 minutes and 35 seconds till opening as I write this) and trying to get stuff sorted for the launch of selling options for the project posting a letter has a low priority for my creative energy. On the other hand what’s inside is pretty damn good!
You will note that I am back to ordinary stamps for a number of reasons, one of which is that apart from one that i stuck on a misprinted envelope and one ghastly one I am saving, I have run out of commemorative stamps.
I got stung in the face by a bee today for no reason: unusual, but I did drastic things with them yesterday so who knows.
An unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year
