a head full of bright ideas

Things evolved with my last painting. It was so annoying that the black headscarf I had initially surrounded the face with immediately categorised the image as "muslim woman"....and that lead to whole lot of assumptions that completely hijacked any narrative the picture instigated. If the scarf had been painted on it could been changed but I had used draped and stiffened fabric so it became an unremovable feature (like being a muslim/woman)

I feel an instinctive resistance to contriving narratives for my images. That is why I found that one I did a month ago really irritating. It's called "Dreaming a place" and its the one with the gothic arch and doorway in the background (changed it from "Golden Pierrot") If I wanted to tell stories I should have been a writer.

Is this a bit of a conflict maybe...? that I want to show you something but not tell you anything? Isn't a picture supposed to be worth a 1000 words? People do art for a lot of reasons and that is undeniably a good thing because lots of people look at art for different reasons. So there is always going to be some artists and some viewers who find their reasons for doing it and looking at it are compatible.

It is very difficult to become accepted as a serious, credible and professional art practitioner if you don't have a theory about why you make art, what it means and (therefore) why you have something important to say. There are some artists who do this with absolute conviction and many of them make art I find deeply compelling. Truly awesome. And then there are some others I find utterly unconvincing!

So I think its a problem for me that I just like making pictures. So far I haven't been able to find or construct a theory that sounds credibly profound. Serious people in the artworld disparage art for arts sake. The best justification I can find for myself is that I find the surfaces fascinating to create and beautiful to look at. Professing a desire to make "beauty" in art is even more anathema to "serious art people" (I'll just annotate that to SAPs in future)

So before I get any further with shooting myself in the foot I'll just unveil my latest effort. This one will be called "Wrapt: head full of bright ideas" It will be my entry in the painting section of the Murrurundi Art Prize.
You can see it really doesn't look too much like a muslim woman anymore...I hope!

Wrapt: head full of bright ideas