Thursday 30 June 2016

'When I get busy, I get stupid'





'I think it's good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you're sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.

Take time to be bored. One time I heard a coworker say, 'When I get busy, I get stupid'. Ain't that the truth. Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I'm bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts - it's so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you're out of ideas, wash dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, 'Avoiding work is the way I focus my mind'.

Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it's going to lead you.'






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Thursday 23 June 2016

on not representing things




Throughout my life I have struggled as much with the idea of 'representational/figurative' as I have with 'non-representational/abstract'.

Here are two drawings from 1980.







There was a satisfaction in working with these shapes and tones, and making compositional choices. But something was wrong. Not wrong in the sense that people who make this kind of drawing are in any way mistaken, but wrong for me; wrong for my purpose (unknown).

When I went to India to work in the mid 1980s, I wasn't doing much. But after a few days of sitting in my roof top room looking at the monsoon clouds hovering above the valley below, I felt something move.





Being there unlocked a kind of magical freedom. Every day I drew continuously (in the sense that I just started drawing and didn't stop, my pencil never leaving the page) and without thought. My line seemed to have finally broken free.
















But one day I had to leave, and the line went back into its cage. Nothing happened after that for a long time.

I was left, though, with a sense of the spirit of the free line. Later I would study Indian, Chinese and Japanese art and find out about a different aesthetic. A different purpose for art. Not for individual expression. Not for the representation of externally observable forms. This art was motivated by a more internal impulse, a desire to make the viewer feel the energy and flow of life itself

In the many twists and turns that followed, I never gave up the idea of somehow finding a way to make art that expressed this feeling of life. But I could never see a way to do it. Every time I drew something that was in front of me, a 'representational' drawing, it felt dead, lifeless. Every time I tried to go away from the representational, it felt pointless.  In the end I gave up.

How I found my way back is another story. In the end life found a way to come through when I wasn't looking, crept in by the back door.













This reminiscing was prompted by my making a 'representational' painting of the horizon a day or so ago. I didn't paint what was in front of me.  I looked at the sea for a long time. Then I came home and painted how it lived in my memory, how it felt.






It still looked like a bit of a pointless representational image ('Why do that? Hundreds of thousands of artists make paintings of the sea every day. There are enough people working on that, and most of them will make more interesting images than me'). It's not that I'm 'trying to be original'. I just bore myself. I want to make an image that interests me, an image that surprises me...

So I made a new kind of image from the painting.





That would do for that day.

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Wednesday 22 June 2016

'the fear that your fate IS in your own hands, but that your hands are weak'




'...Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself. This is not the Age of Faith, Truth and Certainty.

Yet even the notion that you have a say in this process conflicts with the prevailing view of artmaking today - namely, that art rests fundamentally upon talent, and that talent is a gift randomly built into some people and not into others. In common parlance, either you have it or you don't - great art is a byproduct of genius, good art is a product of near-genius... and so on down the line to pulp romances and paint-by-numbers. This view is inherently fatalistic - and offers no useful encouragement to those who would make art. Personally, we'll side with Conrad's view of fatalism: namely, that it is a species of fear - the fear that your fate is in your own hands, but that your hands are weak.'


David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art and Fear

Friday 17 June 2016

'I no more have a work ethic than I have self-discipline'






'When I hear talk about 'the work ethic' I puke. CEOs talk about it, whose annual salaries average one hundred and thirty times their workers' wages. Whatever the phrase purports to describe, it is not an ethic; it is not an idea of work's value or a moral dictate but a feeling or tone connected to work, and it is temperamental and cultural. Studs Terkel's stonemason has it, and his line-worker does not; instead, the line-worker has work-anger, or work-malevolence, which is entirely appropriate. Mind you, the stonemason works alone with his hands solving problems that change with every stone. He does something that he can look at and put his name to. He can measure what he has done in walls and buildings not in units of the same thing, like so many Chevrolet Impalas or so many distributor cap linings. Shades of John Ruskin. I no more have a work ethic that I have self-discipline. I have so many pages a day, so many books and essays.'

Donald Hall, 2003, Life Work





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Wednesday 15 June 2016

'making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself'


'Making art is difficult. We leave drawings unfinished and stories unwritten. We do work that does not feel like our own. We repeat ourselves. We stop before we have mastered our materials, or continue long after their potential is exhausted. Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds that the pieces we have completed. And so questions arise: How does art get done? Why, often does it not get done? And what is the nature of the difficulties that stop so many who start?







These questions, which seem so timeless, may actually be particular to our age. It may have been easier to paint bison on the cave walls long ago that to write this (or any other) sentence today. Other people, in other times and places, had some robust institutions to shore them up: witness the Church, the clan, ritual, tradition. It's easy to imagine that artists doubted their calling less when working in the service of God than when working in the service of self.






Not so today. Today almost no-one feels shored up. Today artwork does not emerge from a secure common ground; the bison on the wall is someone else's magic.






Making art now means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward. Making the work you want to make means setting aside these doubts so that you may see clearly what you have done, and thereby see where to go next. Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself. This is not the Age of Faith, Truth and Certainty.'

David Bayles  & Ted Orland, 1993, Art and Fear








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Tuesday 14 June 2016

'just keep doodling and magic will appear'






'One thing I've learnt in my brief career: it's the side projects that really take off. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that's just play. That's actually the good stuff. That's when the magic happens.'




Or, as a good friend of mine once said, 'just keep doodling and magic will appear'.


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Monday 13 June 2016

regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh






"Regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh… Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No. They always do the right thing. But if you will treat yourself—for a while—as a cloud or wave, and realize that you can't make a mistake whatever you do, because even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other... Then through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition. This is the middle way of knowing that it has nothing to do with your decision to do this or not. Whether you decide that you can't make a mistake, or whether you don't decide it, it's true anyway. You are like cloud and water. And through that realization, without overcompensating in the other direction, you will come to the point where you begin to be on good terms with your own being, and to be able to trust your own brain."

Alan Watts


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Sunday 12 June 2016

the lightest touch





The Lightest Touch


Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.


  -- David Whyte

     from Everything is Waiting for You 
     ©2003 Many Rivers Press 






My images don't come if there's any kind of heaviness in my intention. Even referring to 'my work' brings a kind of leadenness.






Even talking of my workspace as my 'studio'.






The heavy weight of the history of art, the heavy weight of the European/American aesthetic, the heavy weight of the contemporary commercial art world, the heavy weight of conceptualism...
















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Saturday 11 June 2016

darkness and light





'One of the phenomena that I've worked with over many years is darkness. Darkness is a fact that we all know about, an idea about the absence of light. Very simple. What interests me however is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness that I can generate, let's say a block of stone with a cavity in it can have a darkness, is resident in you already; that you know already. This is not a verbal connection, but a bodily one. That's why sculpture occupies the same space as your body,





One of my preoccupations is the actual and necessary coexistence of light with darkness. I lived with an overwhelming sense of darkness for a long time. Injustice, suffering, inequality, cruelty, greed. Unconscious of this, I unconsciously sought out something that could counter these things. There was no sense that they were ever going to go away, but, like a slime mould moving away from a threat to its existence, I groped for something else. 







I'm surrounded by sensitive people who are fighting for justice. Angry, furious, inflamed to action. I've done a lot of that, I fought my various causes for decades. Now I fight for joy. The darkness is everywhere, and now one of my jobs is to make light. Not in denial of darkness, but as a tool for managing it.












It's easy to forget joy. Or to feel that joy is not permitted for as long as there's such terrible suffering in the world; perhaps also to feel that the only viable role for art is to bring that suffering to people's attention.

Something that helped me see this differently was a film called  Amandla:


'Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony is a 2002 documentary film depicting the struggles of black South Africans against the injustices of Apartheid through the use of music. The film takes its name from the Zulu and Xhosa word amandla, which means power.'















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Friday 10 June 2016

'But you can't invest it with meaning after you've made it...'




Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa.



JT So if there were no commissions at all, what would you do in the morning?



AK Oh that's great, I’d love that. I would come to the studio and do my thing. What one does in the studio in fact is to pose a series of problems to oneself. You can come in and say, yes I have this funny notion that I want to make a blob of gooey mass of certain dimensions, that has a certain effect. And then, having made it, I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world anyway!



JT But you can't invest it with a meaning after you've made it.



AK Oh, those processes are complex. One can find a way to do precisely that. Naming is one of those ways. Context is another. What happens if I put it next to another object? How does that change its reason for being, its effect on the body? One of the phenomena that I've worked with over many years is darkness. Darkness is a fact that we all know about, an idea about the absence of light. Very simple. What interests me however is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness that I can generate, let's say a block of stone with a cavity in it can have a darkness, is resident in you already; that you know already. This is not a verbal connection, but a bodily one. That's why sculpture occupies the same space as your body.









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Thursday 9 June 2016

'problems of output are problems of input'


Another way that the computer/internet is vital for me is in showing me images and ideas that aren't my own. This has a stimulating, organising effect, and is often a kind of focussing; bringing something that I've forgotten back into consciousness.

This morning, for example, I saw this image by an artist called Morag Muir:





This image brought back an idea I've been working with since my trip to the Hoysala temples and Jain paintings two years ago.... Narrative friezes made up of multiple frames. Framed people. People in boxes. People trying to get out of frames, overstepping the frame boundary. You see this all over the Indian tradition, in both sculpture and in painting.





























































Austin Kleon again:
'Problems of output are often problems of input. If you’re output isn’t where you want it to be, try working on your input.'


The internet feeds me when I forget where I am. 

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