Walking Therapy: Balls to Conformity

Transcript

Nobody gave me sin for this That’s reason why I try both If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this If all is old, I can see a thousand times of this like this. To be clear even if you just for example looked at the landscapes of the people in this group or one of the local galleries you would see quite a variance of style even there not just dictated by medium but just totally different stylistic and subject matter approaches to the same scenery and geography and I think within that you get more of a more of a sense of what’s going on but it was really brought to my attention a few weeks ago when a group of us ran an arts day for a local school these were 14 year old kids from the local secondary school we set up the local town hall and set up with various stations and it was a bit like large group speed dating for artistic techniques so start off doing some printing and then move around to do miniature painting and then making little zines and so there was quite a diversity there just in terms of the approaches that we were advocating and helping these these kids make stuff in. I was responsible for a sort of a timeout station where anyone who wasn’t really getting on with or had finished early on the one of the main stations could come and sit with me what I was helping them do was draw with pencil graphite pencil so nothing particularly outlandish or radical thanks to years and years of what I now recognize as using the activity of drawing with pencils as a way to regulate and calm and recent myself I’m quite good with graphite pencils some would say very good and because it was a sort of regulation exercise with me it involved doing very sort of detailed hyper real depictions of bits of pieces of photos or image imagery I had so I can I can draw a still life or a portrait it’ll be pretty good most of the time. Anyway I’ve done a couple of these sessions now where the idea is partially about getting people used to or getting them to think slightly differently about pencil as a medium both in terms of the materials themselves but also in terms of using pencil as a way to explore the facets of of the world around us in terms of things within their surroundings light and shade shape and form and so on and pencil is quite good for this because it’s very versatile and ultimately exists to depict shading light and shade and you don’t have to be distracted unless you happen to be doing color pencils by things like the color although you do have to take it into account ultimately your job is to transfer this thing in front of me into something that’s two-dimensional and grayscale that looks three-dimensional and it’s not an easy medium to work with per se but it is an easy medium to get started and to get some level of results with quite quickly and it’s certainly one of the easier mediums to help people understand shape form light and shade with so I have a sort of a bit of a routine of materials that introduce people to this concept that essentially moves them from drawing spheres of little wooden balls and cubes have little cubes in place with a sort of a fairly a bleak light source that helps it cast the shadow and get them thinking about first the fact that there’s no lines here where do you see the lines many people’s early approach to drawing is to draw the outline of everything they see which is not per se bad but you put yourself in a position there where you’re only really thinking about shape rather than form and it can be hard to sort of throw back from so I get people to observe the fact that where they see lines particularly in a cube or the perimeter of a ball what they’re actually seeing is a boundary between light and dark and by controlling the lighting around these very ultimately very simple objects you can demonstrate how that changes depending on those lighting conditions and and start drawing people’s attention to the fact that that ball doesn’t exist in floating in space it’s actually sitting on a surface and it’s casting a shadow on that surface but that surface is also reflecting light back at it and that a lot of people observe that spheres are darker on one side and lighter on the other but when they’re first starting out frequently fail to notice that the effect that the ground is having on the sphere itself and any experienced artists working in any level of realism will recognize this and and really the point here is not to learn how to draw a sphere it’s to get you thinking about form shape light and shade and ultimately if you’ve got a sphere you’ve got an orange or a melon or an apple or a human head or a planet or whatever and if you’ve got a cube you’ve got a house or you’ve got a fridge or the beginnings of a car and these building blocks can go quite a long way and understanding them at their rudiments might seem a little bit over the academic but once you clear all of the clutter away from these surfaces and recognize them and their facets then putting the clutter back all the features and the differences in shapes and the imperfections and so on becomes a lot easier because you think about those actions in the same context as the form itself and I’m digressing here but digressing is what I do anyway back to the kids these kids some of which were clearly okay with following the rules and didn’t want to uh mess around or skive off or whatever some of them did but I’m not their teacher I wasn’t there to discipline and the ones that turned up and seemed interested in engaging I never didn’t really have time given the the speed that they were being moved around the the main stations I didn’t really have a lot of time to go through the whole thing so I had some sort of teaching aids in form of diagrams and drawings that I’d done myself and tried my best ultimately had to just sort of point in directions some paper and some pencils and say draw that and uh and maybe intervene if I needed to what um what fascinated me was just the absolute radical difference between all the different approaches and styles that I saw from these kids who perhaps had been influenced to a degree by observing other artists or being taught but certainly weren’t old enough to have been thoroughly indoctrinated in any way by any particular style or movement or approach and you know felt quite raw the different styles and because they’re all drawing something that’s very uniform like that they I try to light the balls in all in pretty much the same way and they’re all exactly the same pretty much and and so although I wouldn’t exactly start calling this a controlled scientific experiment just in terms of observing different approaches it’s not a bad way to go because everyone’s drawing something that is very homogeneous and there’s not a lot of room for interpretation and so I kind of was bowled over by just how radically different these kids approaches to this was some of them were slow and methodical my my general pointers in terms of this is don’t try and do one bit thoroughly and then move on to the next bit because it’s really hard to keep things harmonized when you do that and also you’re making it hard on yourself when rendering particularly mid tones which really benefit from being lifted up together and if you want a cohesive drawing I and it’s not by any means canonical but my experience is building it up in layers of of light to mid to dark tones pretty much the whole thing at once and then getting darker and darker allows you to tweak and darken as you go along and really accustom your eyes and your brain to the range of tones that are in there as they as they sort of emerge and allows you to get quite soft shading and since I’m not particularly delicate of hand it’s a technique that works well for me because I can build things up via layers that don’t themselves necessarily have to be that perfect anyway no one listened to that I sort of gave up trying about half an hour in and people were doing some approaches where they were very methodical from one edge in others were much more frenetic and scribbly others were approaching it somewhat more like what I would and everything in between and of the ones who really seemed to lean into the task some found it sort of frustrating angry and had this level of perfectionism which caused frustration and I had to sort of step in and kind of get them to relax a bit and give them a few pointers others wouldn’t hear of any intervention and just patiently got on with filling it in as they saw it and so on I got I’ve got a pile of these bits of paper with varying degrees of finishedness probably about 100 of them and yeah there’s quite an array there and some of them were just people going through the motions as quickly as possible so as not to embrace the teacher but it’s really quite a dazzling array of approaches and I’ve done this with adults as well and the same thing applies now I’m not an art teacher don’t think I ever will be I don’t have any real desire to be so so any art teachers that happen to be listening to this I doubt they’re learning anything new from what I’m saying and I don’t think I’ve observed anything fundamental that isn’t pretty obvious but what I guess strikes me is that certainly I feel like some of that diversity can dissipate and starts to dissipate I certainly don’t see a huge amount of diversity outside of the the major art galleries and I do wonder whether some of that exploratory style gets beaten out of people but even with the adults I see different approaches and even when you take two artists who to my eye whose work seemed to come from a similar place when you see them approaching exactly the same subject the radical differences in how they do that it’s quite startling and then you look at their major body of work and it’s actually fairly similar and I find all this really interesting I think is a point that ties back to the sort of ingenuity that you see that within galleries and within the commercial art world I’ve too many times I’ve been to commercial and contemporary art fairs and ended up chatting to the artists who were going yeah I’ll do this stuff because it’s what makes the money what I’d rather be doing is x and looking slightly full on about it and to a degree that’s what the market wants the market wants what the market wants people tend to not want things that in terms of art that are going to be on their walls long term that visitors are going to see that makes them stand out in ways that they’re not sure about and so there’s a level to which people’s expectations uh play very much into their art buying decisions and uh and as a result has that diversity of approaches and styles disappeared as kids get older the ones that stay in engaged with art and creativity have they lost that diversity that willingness to do things how they want to do it it’s quite no means a representative cross section or a definitive proof but the adults who I work with tend to be quite a lot older than me retirees and the diversity of styles I observe there are just as radical even if the outputs don’t necessarily bear that out and let’s be clear I’m not suggesting that all the wonderful people who are part of why wider art fraternity are driving out homogeneous work there’s an immense amounts of creativity and stylistic individuality on display lots of hard work and real real ability I don’t use the word talent I avoid it at all costs that’s for another day it’s just that I think that the stuff that gets gets seen by the wider world is the stuff that for the most part people feel is going to appeal to the wider world and therefore some of that underlying diversity just gets hidden but it’s still there and there’s a degree to which well that’s life that’s the world we live in we can’t all be Jacob Rees-Mogg or one of these other anachronistic humans who can have a public persona that is from a different time a different era Grayson Perry so on we’re not lucky enough to be able to express ourselves in any way we want like Hockney or Damien Hirst or whoever you want to mention because we have to sell arts to people who have an expectation of a certain type of art we want to we can’t turn up in some bonkers fantasy mad something out of a different time period cross-dressing garb like Grayson Perry because sometimes I have to turn up in an office or go on conference calls and quite frankly prejudice is a side that type of thing is likely to be a bit distracting so we hide those bits of ourselves and and that I find sad I don’t find it sad that people want what they want I find it sad that so many artists out there have to spend more of their time than they’d like producing stuff because it sells rather than producing stuff because because it’s what they want because it’s really the true extension of their personality and their experiences and it makes them happy and and given the thesis of this podcast it’s making art for the masses because it makes money bad for your mental health it could be I’m not convinced it is and I still think there’s worse ways to earn a living worse ways for your mental health to earn a living and I do not begrudge criticize or belittle people who do that one tiny little bit I I feel for you if you’re lucky enough to be producing work that sells no matter what which also happens to be exactly what you want to be doing then I tell you the luckiest person alive if you’re having to compromise your desires and your vision simply because that vision is not you have not found a market for it I my heart goes out to you and I think you’re the people on the front line you’re the people that are supporting the rest of us bless you and keep fighting the good fight but don’t stop looking for the market for what you really want to be doing try and find a way to do that because I think that for me anyway the ability to work on wherever whatever suits me whatever makes me happy at that moment to explore and to engage with new material subject matters approaches styles that makes me happy it makes me relaxed and the inverse is true when I try and force myself to conform to something or to stick to a particular thread for long periods that can actually have an entirely detrimental effect on my mental health and I’m lucky enough that I can earn money elsewhere to the degree that leaves me enough time and money to support myself and my family while also spending plenty of time in the studio and experimenting and pissing around and I don’t want that to change if it’s a case of having to do my day job for many many many more years to support me being able to see what the hell ever I want then so be it I just don’t think I have it in me to do otherwise doesn’t make me better doesn’t make me more of an artist doesn’t make anyone else less of an artist it’s just a fact I know about myself and I think the other thing to remember here is that sometimes you think that a lack of interest in the stuff that you love the most equals a lack of market or or an actual lack of interest in that and that’s just a reality but that’s never the case there’s a there’s a market and there’s an audience for anything that someone is delivered with passion and love it just takes longer to find the audience for some than it does for others and sometimes you have to create that audience sometimes you have to find it sometimes that audience finds you sometimes you may feel like you’re alone in the wilderness but suddenly the world comes around to meet you suddenly civilization is there around you and uh because you’re stuck to your guns that now suddenly what you do is fashionable and maybe you had something to do with that and maybe just doing your thing was all that ever needed something happened recently to me I I went through a phase of doing really really big paintings of people’s faces usually women usually very very close up often in old aspect ratios often hyper realistic and quite what’s the word what is the words quite in your face not necessarily challenging but certainly requiring a certain amount of attention and I like to work big I find working small very very difficult I just don’t have delicate hands but uh big paintings use lots of paint here’s lots of canvas if you have them stretched take up a lot of space and it just it’s just stopped being feasible for me to work big so I haven’t stopped completely but highly unusual now for me to stretch out a big canvas and do something like that which to be clear I would love to do more of but either way I’ve got some of these around the place and that have all been stretched and I just like them and uh and so I bring them out every now and again and have them on show and think who’s got the wall space for this giant green staring lady that’s probably about in a meter and a half square who’s got the space for this ultra close cropped hyper real close up of a woman’s face most of which is not on the canvas some of my favorite artworks but who’s got the space and who really wants to sit there in their dining room or in their living room with this giant staring face that’s that was my interpretation and uh that might be true for some people but the two pictures I’ve just described and if you go back a couple of episodes you’ll hear the story of one of them selling it’s the episode about bees can’t remember what number it is well the other one sold yesterday giant big green staring lady one of the biggest pieces I ever did and uh I was just staggered when they said because they came up to me at the pub and says you know that painting you’ve got in the in the picture house you know the big green one with the staring lady would just sell us that one and I was like well hell yeah but hold on let’s make sure are you sure are you sure that this is the one you want let me show you a photo because are you absolutely sure that you want this one and I showed to them yeah that’s the one and then they came around my house the next day and I was like right okay he goes well how can I pay you I said no no let’s let’s take this and go and look at it in place because only live up the road for me and make sure that you really want this and he was our shrugs at yes sure white love let’s just go and do that almost shimmering me probably was and we took it up there and their house is not big let’s be clear it’s not small either it’s just a cottage it’s beautiful it’s one of the loveliest house I’ve been in but it’s not mansion which is what I assumed you needed to house one of these big paintings and they have this living room of gorgeous decor covered in really amazing artworks and the walls are green and it just happened tonally that that shade of green worked very very well with the green in their living room and it put it length up against the wall where it was going to hang and it’s like yeah it’s where it wants to be that’s where it should be that’s where I want that painting so please sell it to me but uh I mean it took up most of the war and uh and I just I just was liking okay great I mean I’m really pleased about this and it looks amazing but I just didn’t think that customer existed anyway just goes to show that your preconceptions about what people like and they what they don’t what market exists out there for your work and what people are willing to put in their houses is almost certainly wrong or at least skewed and so that was just a mentally positive experience for me and now I’m thinking hey I’m going to do lots more giant staring ladies actually probably not sure I’ve developed quite quite a big enough market for that yet but who knows I actually have several more in my collection so what this really means is I get to dust off some older one stretch them and stick them up hopefully there are more buyers for it from kids drawing spheres to uh how to sell giant artworks with staring ladies there’s a market for it folks so if you’re uh if you’re thinking that’s what you’d rather be doing then the delicate little watercolors you’re doing right now then rock on art against mental illness