Art Takes - Decay and Rebirth

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. So this is another Art Takes episode. After the last one that I released someone commented to me that they found the experience of listening to me noodle around with bits of artwork to be quite relaxing. So that’s that’s a result I’m quite happy with. So I’m going to release some more of these over the coming weeks. As ever this was recorded on my headphone mic so the quality is not great. There’s a version of this on YouTube. I’ll put the link in the show notes that has some visuals with it. The second part was actually videoed and I put some nice pictures on the video version where you’ll get to see the actual picture that I was working on and some other bits and pieces. I think it’s all very karmic and calm. So I hope you enjoy it and I hope it makes you feel mellow and I’ll be back again soon. Bye. Back in my studio it’s the end of November and for moment time my studio reads two degrees celsius what’s that 30 39 or something fahrenheit thinking about decay something that is quite prevalent this time of the year with autumn and the leaves falling and ferns and foliage dying back. It’s not a negative thing. Decay happens. Things grow and things die. Everything has its as its moment and I quite like it. Much of the work I’m working on at the moment to the artwork is is is abstract and one way or the other is sort of related to decay. It’s just another natural process and nature is quite good at finding ways to hide beauty in plain sight around processes that aren’t themselves necessarily the most desirable processes. No one likes to see the end of something but if that end is is as beautiful as the golden or red leaves that adorn the countryside certainly in the UK at the moment then it’s a it’s a good trade-off. Well because of the slightly random way that I approach making art and I tend to be quite experimental but also a little bit lazy and I’m very what’s the word clumsy and so I tend to mess things up because I just can’t stop tinkering or doing stuff and I go too far cover everything in water and paint and all these sorts of things and what happens is that things get messed up. I use acrylic paints almost exclusively and they’re supposed to be they’re plastic really. They’re supposed to be waterproof and they are to a degree but it really depends on the surface you put it on the particular medium you know whether it’s an expensive paint or a cheap one you know all sorts of factors of play whether it’s gloss or matte and the pigment used and so if you paint some acrylic onto a surface and let it dry then wet it again sometimes it will bubble up you’ve probably seen something similar if you’ve ever got your paints on your walls wet and and if you’ve done that in your house someone splashed paint somewhere splashed water or something on a some paint and it started to bubble up or maybe you’ve seen it on a around a leak in your ceiling it’s not desirable at all there and I understand that but it’s actually quite a beautiful effect and where the paint lifts off the surface when it’s wet and it bunches and puckers up and I’m looking at the canvas at the moment where I’ve put several layers of paint on top of what was an old a very old painting that I’d never finished and I never really liked and let it mostly dry and then I’ve wet it again and dripped I wet it with various colors of heavily diluted acrylic ink and we’ve got all these little amazing patterns coming up and some of it looks quite organic almost like the the ridging and puckering you get around scars on your on your skin like little tiny mountain ranges and the paint and the water pulls in between them and the shadows that they cast give it a really interesting texture and of course the trick here is this is well I say this is going to dry I’ve got the heater on and I’ve applied the hair dryer to this a bit but it’s so cold in here that it’s going to take a long time to dry that irks me but I think because it takes longer to dry we get more of this effect so I just need to be sort of patient and when when this dries up this is part of the wonder of this type of process is that I never really know how it’s going to look and and obviously this is making the paint and the medium more fragile if I touch it now I can just you know wipe the paint off and destroy this in fact if I wanted to I could scrape a lot of this back and go back to the canvas but I don’t want to I want to keep as much as effect as I can so you know I have to let it dry and hope that this texturing remains on the canvas and then it’s still because it’s lifted off the canvas it’s still going to be fragile so if there’s some of this texturing left at the end when it’s dry I’ll I’ll try and delicately seal it so that it’s a little bit more sturdy and a bit more permanent and I just really look forward to it I think you know I might get a bit antsy that things take too long to dry middle of summer the the opposite is true things dry too quickly so I’m not very easy to please but this process when it takes longer you’re sort of stretching the time frame out when you get to as you get to enjoy the the various stages and I need to remind myself that you know art for me is all about the process and part of that process is just watching things happen whether it’s a you know a portrait emerging you know in front of me as I paint it or whether I’ve created these organic effects letting inks or water or whatever flow across a surface and and what they’re going to do and trying not to interfere with them it’s so intensely mindful and this particular canvas I put some texture on it already but I’ve got I don’t throw anything away I’ve got a whole bag of cuttings of like A4 printer paper sheets that I’ve used for creating collage or as references from my printer and so I’ve got loads of strips of edging off cut of varying different weights of paper and I’ve just taken a bunch of these and I just use PVA to stick them to the canvas so they’ve created these ridges that where it’s just very slightly stands proud of the the canvas and and then painted over that and the paints are dried around it and stuck it to the canvas and then the the inks and stuff I’ve used sort of pulled down the edges so it sort of created some structure in there and so what I’m looking at at the moment almost looks like a like a you know a board of a I don’t know a wall or a cupboard or something that’s been left outside to to get to decay but I’ve done it under sort of very controlled circumstances something but there’s something quite industrial about it and I like photographing sort of decayed industrial rusty and flaky surfaces when I’m out and about in a city or or in the town or or even in the country and you see it everywhere and I think people don’t notice it but I do and I find a real a real power and beauty in that and I don’t I don’t really think about it in terms of do I like that it’s decaying is it the fact that it’s decaying that I like or is it the fact that it’s just beautiful and I think it’s the latter I think it’s it’s it’s really interesting and and beautiful and organic and you can walk out on every door and see sort of organic structures and forms and shapes and growths and stuff anywhere you like with its trees and fields or or whatever just plants in your garden or by the side of the road and I think firstly you sort of get used to seeing that it starts to feel a little bit monochrome and and and I think you should spend some time looking more closely at this stuff because because it’s all got its beauty but this this type of sort of industrial or modernistic decay of things like paints and rust and and so on it’s got its own beauty and its own organic fractal nature what what I’ve really really noticed in the last couple of months when I’ve pretty much been exclusively experimenting with abstract works of a sort of of either fully sort of organic or sort of industrial organic nature you do things like I created a sort of a mixture of pva and acrylic medium and and I I just purely by accident when they dropped some ink acrylic ink into it and and it started creating all these beautiful little fractal patterns like little trees with lots of little branches and and that will join and spread and spread and they keep spreading and I just wash it so I get so mesmerized by them and they create so many lots of little distinct unique patterns that won’t be seen anywhere else ever again like proper chaotic fractal patterns like a a snowflake and I can go on for hours about chaos theory uh fractals and non-linear dynamics and all these things that relate to types of order emerging from highly unordered high high entropy systems and maybe I’ll one day I’ll do a an episode on chaos and introduce some of these concepts it I don’t want to scare too many people away because it gets quite heavy duty quite quickly but I think if you’re an artist you’ve seen these types of thing I think especially sort of watercolor artists where you’re doing wet on wet wet on dry and the different effects you get are hard to control and highly organic and produce absolutely incredible patterns and shapes and textures and and you’ll you’ll have observed the the swirls and the fractals and stuff in it and and I hope you delight in that and you should sort of sit there and watch it rather than hoping it will dry because that’s really the best part and what’s incredible about this is no one else gets to see it so once my little fractal patterns dry then they’re really hard to see and they they sort of lose a bit of their distinction and um their definition and they’re still amazing but they’re not the thing that I saw when I was making it and I’ve tried various approaches to to to try and lock these in but all of them either end in roughly the same outcome or sort of ruin ruin the color and the shapes and the organic nature of it um so it doesn’t really work and uh and it’s a real shame and I sort of I’ve genuinely been considering setting up my camera you know I really need like a good macro lens something that can get real close up and just making some videos of these things emerging because I’m like well look you can see this work of art now right when it’s finished and I think you’ll like it but but you miss the best part you know you miss the most exciting fun bit and the drama that unfolded and only I got to see that and and I sort of feel like I’m denying the world something here because it’s one of the most engrossing things you can watch and if you’re the sort of person who likes watching clouds mutate or um you can get mesmerized by a a leaf floating around in a stream or you know anyone who likes observing processes I get absolutely mesmerized by things like um factory conveyor belts and um and anything that’s sort of repetitive and but is doing something that that feels like it’s achieving something and you know I just I can just get lost by just watching things like that and so any sort of process for me I find wonderful and of course this process is everywhere and and you you know some are slower and some are faster and in the beginning of um spring is is such a magical time for me it’s like Disneyland gets invited into my world once a year for free as you watch the the natural world uh rise up and recreate itself and create new things that are the same but different and you know going to my garden and watching what’s coming out whether uh the shoots are shooting up and and things are sprouting and uh and just the excitement of of it all and everything is so everything is so vibrant and new and fresh and you see these processes sort of unfolding and it’s actually you know in one sense it’s quite slow and you’re sort of willing that bulb to sprout into a daft or a daft deal or whatever but on the other hand you know you don’t want it to stop and and and sometimes it feels like it happens really quick and and so maybe you have to go away for a bit to a city where you don’t see much of it and you come back a few days or a week later and and everything sort of exploded that the trees that didn’t have leaves on them a week ago suddenly a big wash of pale greens and yellows and and blocking out the sun and and soaking up all the all its energy and it’s just so it’s just so dramatic and and i think people miss it i think i’m not going to berate people for looking down at their phones all the time i i’m every bit as guilty as that of that as other people but i uh i really think that you’ve got to turn it off every now and again and and lift your head up and look around and and maybe not as not everyone’s as mesmerized by the processes of nature for me maybe it’s uh maybe it’s architecture i mean just walking around the town and the city people forget to look up and over that row of shops there’s there’s always some really interesting buildings especially if your town’s been around for a while and and if you go down the the octoride the high street octoride is just one big long road it’s called the lang toon the long town and uh there’s such a mismatch of architecture and you see a lot of this sort of mixture of newer stuff older stuff ugly 70s brutalism and uh really really ancient like uh you know victorian era and older uh there’s even a fragment of a castle uh in one place and and some stunning old uh manor house buildings and lots and lots of decay lots of broken down farming buildings and and the like and and they just look around you and there’s so much to see and it’s just a little town that no one’s heard of um you know five thousand people live here but it’s just so much to see if you just lift your head up and take a look around and if that don’t float your boat we’ve got the mountains you know on the horizon sort of in both directions you can look from here directly into the highlands uh the grampians and there’s so much to see and what i love about this place is that it’s never the same two minutes in a row the scottish weather is the best variable and but there’s so much dramatic scenery to see there’s so much character in every direction that you look and and you never get bored with the views because there you never see the same view twice and because the views are so big because the vistas are so grand there’s always some drama to see somewhere and and why do you need you know the latest uh kardashian or football wife spat on your on your phone when you’ve when you’ve got that again i’m not begrudging people that stuff i just think you need to make time and space for other things um the glorious world around you because there’s a whole bunch of people hell bent in on destroying it and maybe maybe these processes won’t be visible for too much longer and if they’re not and i’ve got my i’ve got my paints and i’ve got my decay and my bubbling bubbling surfaces and and little mountain ranges and splashes and washes of color and fractal explosions just magnificent contrast and textures it’s really hard not to not to touch it because i like to especially when i’ve got a lot of texture in a picture i like to touch it because it just feels nice it feels interesting and i’ll destroy this if i touch it i have to wait until it dries i did once consider making one or more artworks that are highly textures and built to be touched so that you could put them up in a gallery and and people would be encouraged to touch it and it would sort of wear away over time and and you could sort of keep turning it around so that different bits of it get touched move it to different places move it at different heights and just keep moving so it’s this living artwork that that changes over over years and years very slightly very slowly as people wear away bits of it it’s the next day now and i’m back in my studio uh my studio is a total mess but uh i’ve come back to to see my uh the artwork that i was playing around with yesterday um so let’s see how we’ve got on i took it into the house last night uh because i wanted to let it dry a bit a lot it was on my one of my radiators and uh it’s dried i think completely so i can now touch it and there’s nothing coming off and i’m looking at where all of the sort of bubbling and uh and the ridges and where the paint was made wet um and it’s all completely dried now and it’s kept a lot of its texture actually uh way more than i thought uh when i first looked at it this morning it wasn’t in very good light and i thought it had sort of flattened out and sort of disappeared and it has definitely flattened out but uh it’s still very much there and it’s if anything there’s some new features come out of it there’s a real sort of uh mixing of colors coming on here and where the pain to the inks have have pulled in between ridges and so on there are definitely features of this it feels like a like almost like an alien landscape because i’d actually put some pretty big blobs of oh what was it oh i i found some old blobs of paint stuck to a an easel and i pulled those off and stuck them on to give it a bit of texture and they’re almost like mountains and you can imagine we’re looking down at the surface of an alien planet and and go around and over it and there’s there’s lots of different terrain and the colors are really vibrant and in this light and there’s definitely different regions of this uh and there’s little little bits that are really really interesting and i’m always sort of tempted with stuff like this to to cut it up into little pieces because there’s a whole i think it’s cool i think i need to have a little bit more of a tinker with it but it’s it feels quite balanced which is which is really my litmus test but there’s so many little regions on here that could be broken up into smaller artworks or make a little grid of them and i think that would be cool but what i also think would be cool is just not doing that and leaving the hell alone i need to resist the urge to tinker here i feel like doing is it’s just working on a few bits to bring out some of the features and maybe i will but i’ve got a nasty tendency to mess things up and and i don’t really don’t want to do that maybe this is done and and there’s nothing more to do but but this is just the beginning of the next phase because some of these bits of paint i think are quite fragile uh so i have to seal them a bit and i then have to decide how i want to uh varnish it or whether i want to vanish i think it has to be varnish given the amount of abuse that i’ve given this canvas to protect it and so i have to wait for it to dry before i can do that and then what type of can what type of varnish do i want and you know sometimes seems obvious that you’ll use say a gloss varnish because because it’s sort of it tends to really bring out the color but um i did some uh gloss some stuff the other day in it and it actually didn’t work uh it just it wasn’t the right approach for those particular paintings where i’ve uh used graphite to create a sheen and uh the gloss varnish actually ended up dulling it it had more of a sheen on it before i varnished it so i’ve got to be careful here and then it it’s buckled a bit overnight because i had it on the radiator it’s only on canvas board uh and and it’s pretty crappy cheap old bit of canvas board so if someone wants to put this on their wall it’s not in a state to do that uh so it would need to be uh reinforced somehow and uh and framed and and again none of these are particularly arduous tasks but it’s all stuff that i’ve got to make decisions about and i don’t have a lot of money so i can’t really afford to put a really nice frame on this uh and it’s quite conceivable that i just have to leave it how it is uh until i can afford to get it framed and that seems a bit of a shame because i think this is i’ve been messing around with abstract for for weeks now and i’m i’m now starting to you know find my feet with this a bit and uh this is probably one of my favorites i’ve done so far my love of vibrant colors has really come out in this one and i i’m almost tempted to try and bring them out a little bit more but there’s uh there’s a danger that i’ll end up i’m balancing it and making it um making it worse i’ve got it’s such a such a difficult thing at this point to to just stop and say no just leave it alone and sometimes i’ve had to get people to tell me to just stop and leave it alone and i’ve had to do that to other people too but it’s just i almost don’t want to finish working on it because i’ve really enjoyed doing it and where do i start with the next one i’m running out of canvases at a rate of knots and you know when i put things away you know i tend to put them away and forgetting about them and i never really look at them quite as much again um and i don’t really know i don’t i don’t i’m not a backwards looking person i don’t i don’t tend to do that but and so it’s a bit of a shame because i i think i often miss the pleasure of going back and i’m really looking at stuff that i’ve created but in terms of creating something organic and and and something dramatic i i guess i guess what i wanted with this is dramatic and my favorite abstract works are all quite dramatic and and full of color and texture and and just lots of interesting details and it’s absolutely what i’ve achieved with this maybe you like it maybe won’t maybe abstract is not your thing but if you don’t if you’re looking at this and you don’t see something in it that you find beguiling and or even disturbing or or uncomfortable i think there’s something in here and that you know anyone can at least appreciate and and i’d like to you know i’d say i take credit for this and i’m blowing my own trumpet and saying well this is a good work of art maybe it isn’t maybe it’s just good for me but um i sort of didn’t make it uh nature made this and and the environment made it and i uh i feel like it was a sort of a teamwork it was a it was a partnership and that’s what i’ve really really enjoy and um and so i don’t mind standing here going look at look at this cool thing that i made because you know like anything i’ve made it’s it’s only partly me um and now as i show it to the world it’s one way or the other partly you as you expunge your brain of all memory of it but uh it’s almost it’s like a bit of a celebration for me uh i’m really really quite pleased with how this has come out and i’ll try not to tinker and i will tell you if i do and you can be certainly angry at me unless i actually improve it uh all my sensible instincts are telling me to leave it the hell alone um and that’s maybe what i’ll do i guess watch this space to find out