Yesterday I threw some paint at the work in progress, as I had
suggested I was tempted to in the previous blog. I like where it’s at now,
which is very different from my original limited palette, beige concept. Now I
just have to get brave enough to put more paint on the flesh, particularly the
face. Otherwise this is really 2 works inside the frame that aren’t integrated.
There are some parallels with this work and the last one I did – “Wrapt; head
full of bright ideas” That ended up changing radically from the original concept
too. It ended up being a rather grey and monochromatic face surrounded by lots
of bright abstract stuff. I decided not to alter the face much, being just too worried about stuffing up what was a
fairly competently rendered facial likeness. That I wanted to enter it into the
Murrurundi Art Prize was a bit of a constraint too, with risking any
adventurous alterations, because there was the date deadline.
Beyond, I'm happy with the background but will I be brave enough to alter the figure? |
This a very long blog so some readers might get bored and drop out. Quite understandable as there is a fair bit of navel gazing about to unfold. Close examination of my belly lint probably has very limited interest to others!
So be it.
I have sort of split it into 2 parts so you can get a breather or refreshment approximately half way through if needed.
PART ONE
A decade ago all my 2 dimensional work was abstract and I
also made dolls. The dolls were sculptural and obviously figurative works,
though I acknowledged that the dolls weren’t intended to be characters. I used
them as a way to display my textile art collaged over the figurines. I was
trying to be clever in making my essentially abstract surfaces into a
figurative object that was more easily “understood” (ie, in the SAP {Serious Art People} lingo “accessible”)
by ordinary people who did not have highly evolved ideas about what art is. The
point was that hopefully they would find the figures charming and would give me
cash money to be able to own them!
Perhaps it could be a
metaphor for me and my world that my last 2 artworks are grey, monochromatic
figures surrounded by swirling, bright elements. In the last 3 years, due to
the wonderful circumstances that my husband has bought into my life, I have had
more time to work on my art than ever before. Since January when I broke my ankle I have had
4 months off work. Except for a few weeks when I had to be horizontal I’ve been
able to spend the bulk of this time just doing my art. I have never been so
fully immersed in it and have never had a continuous period of time in my life when
I woke up every day and had few other obligations other than the choice to do
my art.
In just a few months the way I do art has moved forward
rapidly, in a way that might have unfolded over a year or 2 when I only had a
few hours a week. So now I find myself considering these last 2 works and
acknowledge they are metaphoric. The monochromatic, competently rendered
figures represent me, surrounded by clamorous viscous colour. Will I be brave
and adventurous enough to be able to integrate myself with all the brilliance I
feel surround by?...to dive in, make my edges permeable enough to absorb the
gorgeousness of all that is available for us to experience in the visual world….?
I feel really threatened by venturing outside the safe
realms of “competency”. As Roger Skinner put it in the quote I used in my last
blog, to go beyond the ability to “accurately replicate” and “hand back to the
tutor (viewer) what they want”
Doing art is about exploring what freedom is. At its most
highly realised level it is a spiritual practice. All desire to do and create
art expresses a yearning to explore subjective experience and what might be
beyond it. The best art is often achieved when the boundaries are examined and transgressed.
This requires risks to be taken and the humility of dealing with failure is a
regular challenge to be overcome.
This blog is about words (ha!! pretty self evident!) It is a
tool I’m finding useful in helping me focus on what I’m trying to achieve in my
art. There is an essential contradiction here for me because my primary chosen
means of communication is the visual, not the textual. I am often ambivalent
about this textual means of communication. Sometimes it can be exhilarating as
there are some words I find very textured, coloured and emotional. There is
something very satisfying about finding the word that exactly, precisely sums
up what you want to express. But that is also why language can be frustrating,
as so often the word is not known or cannot be found...
Visual art feels like such a more competent, nuanced and
authentic way of expressing an idea
.
Language and text is
an overlay of culture and civilisation which is very necessary but ultimately
messes with the brain. Bugger semiotics and semantics. The subtleties of communication
through the necessary vehicles of language and text. In modernity the vehicles
are in constant revision and flux. Historians devote entire lifetimes to
understanding, deciphering or interpreting in various ways what their subjects “really”
intended or meant. We would find the
written text of our ancestors a hundred years ago hard to understand; the
language would be cumbersome, dated and awkward. Their accents would seem
absurd. The further back you go the more unintelligible the languages and text
of the past. In reality if we spoke to someone of our culture from 200 years
ago we would find it extremely difficult to understand them. Bill Gates wrote
the language which has thrown our modernity into freefall only a few decades
ago. It will define our global civilisation throughout the next millennia. Remarkably
that language uses only TWO SYMBOLS – 0 and 1. Everything in our whole world
has never changed at such a rapid rate and every day it is exponentially
building on that.
So I sit here today using the using the aforementioned ubiquitous
invention of Bill Gates – the “word processor” and are now into the 6th
month of blogging. I’m quite amazed I’ve been able to keep it up! Because it seems
likely I’ll continue into the foreseeable future I decided to do some
researching into how other bloggers do it. Like my art, if I’m going to invest
so much time in it I want to do it well and get the most out of it. My writing
of the last few months has made me realise how stilted, stylised and old
fashioned my writing style is. This is partly because of what I learned at
school in the 60s-70s which was defined as proper written English (haha, have
to use the capital letter there!) and because the last time I wrote such vast
tracts was at University 12 years ago and then it was necessary to adopt the academic style and requirements.
What I have learned from reading numerous blogs in the last
few weeks is rather similar to the learning curve in my artistic practice. Real
world obligations usually mean I don’t have enough time to apply myself every
day to writing and artmaking and the consequence is the way I do both these
things is not very competently and frozen in time with outdated beliefs,
learnings and conventions. A number of wonderful
young women writers have opened my eyes to the contemporary art of blogwriting
in all its awesomeness. These women are
inspiring and electrifying writers who have bought me starkly to the
realisation of my old fashioned, self adopted limits…and I thank them
wholeheartedly!
They are listed down the sidebar of this blog if you want to
investigate them yourself. I particularly recommend, in order of my favourites –
edenland, magnetoboldtoo and bexstar - I’m just a girl & I’ve had it up to
here. However, to quote the Popeye world view with a sense of humility - I am
what I am. I can examine these other writing styles to extrapolate what I like
and to help me loosen up and find my own heartfelt voice. A lot of what I admire
about these writers is their absolute authenticity, their refusal to
compromise, capitulate or pull their heads in to make other people feel more
comfortable. I have a lot of confidence I
can do my own writing better with more time and practise….probably with a lot
less swear words though. That is one convention I find hard to transgress!
PART TWO
Enough of that….at this point I want to return to the one
paragraph sentence I made a while back to wholly explain what I meant. To reiterate -
“Visual art feels like such a more competent, nuanced and authentic
way of expressing an idea”
I spent a lot of time up above explaining why language and text seem such a secondary means of communication. There is something inarticulate, inchoate, from the time before language changed our brains that I want to capture and express in my visual art.
Visual art does communicate by giving the viewer a “feeling”.
It is not like words which encapsulate information as a symbol (through intentionally
grouped letters of the alphabet which represent a word).
As newborns and infants we had no language. We still had
thought processes and through our visual acuity gradually make a sense of the
world of objects ( I’m struggling a bit here because I’m no neurologist, paediatrician
or psychologist….) to survive we have to quickly work out that the objects of
greatest importance are the moving, tactile and soundmaking ones that bring
comfort like food and warmth.
The human face is the first thing we come to
recognise. We quickly find out that the faces respond to what we are doing in
the world – cries of hunger or distress will summon a face that makes certain
sounds, smiles and laughter create predictable responses and sounds from the
face. So our first experience of selfhood and otherness comes from
differentiating objects. Our first experiences of power in the world are that
the objects do predictable things when we express in particular ways. When a
baby expresses contentment by smiling the people around it smile and coo back. Infants
learn to interpret visual clues on the faces of people around them before
acquiring language. The visual is the first way we learn to understand the
world.
My earliest memory is of the colour red. I have no way of
knowing whether this is a genuine memory or one I have manufactured and
embellished, but it really doesn’t matter. I believe I might been less than 2
years old at the time and lying in a crib when a lady came to visit who wore a
bright red coat. The sight of this colour thrilled me so much I remember it still
with a frisson 52 years later. In 1989 when I changed my name by deed poll I
honoured this memory of my first experience of ecstatic feelings by taking on “Red”
as my middle name. Though my favourite colour
is actually orange.
If you made it this far to read all of this I'm really touched. Thank you for your patience and I hope you got some interesting things to think about.
Comments are very welcome!