Art Takes - Damp and Deliverence

Transcript

Nobody gives me sympathy That’s reason why I try both If all is gold I can see a thousand times of it Out against mental illness Hello everybody, coming to you live today from my studio in the wilds of Scotland The thermometer hanging from my ceiling here says it’s 5 degrees Which is practically tropical compared to what it usually is in here And it’s a total fucking mess I sort of despair a little bit It will get tidied up at some point, perhaps when it’s a little bit bloody warmer Although it does strike me that the time to tidy this place up is when it’s a little bit cooler Because at least then I’ll create some body heat But I’m certainly not feeling hugely motivated at the moment Why am I talking to you from my studio? Well partly because I do this from time to time I’m an artist is what I do, I spend time in the studio I’ve struggled to do that of late because it’s so bleeding cold in here and damp And I guess that’s what I want to talk about a little bit I’m not going to bore you and depress you by talking about the Ragnarok of dreary weather We’ve been suffering here in Scotland I have no doubt that most of the UK is having a similar issue But it’s not been pleasant And we haven’t had too much of the more interesting weather like snow Really beautiful frosty mornings and crisp blue sky days where it might be freezing But it’s absolutely glorious now it’s just been gloomy And it’s just grey, my studio feels grey and it’s been raining all the time And this is my studio is like an old workshop With crappy probably asbestos corrugated ceilings and some windows that have gaps in them And I’m upstairs but downstairs is a little bit close to some drainage And overall it’s just damp and dank in here and unless it gets some sunshine on it It just stays humid The flip side of that is in the summer it gets unbearably hot And so there’s never too much winning in here but I’m so lucky to have it That I’m not really complaining per se It just, sometimes I struggle to build up the motivation to come out here and be absolutely freezing And on top of that nothing’s drying And that’s as much to do with the general humidity as it is the cold Although knees are particularly helpful And this is problematic for me because I work in acrylic paints and there’s a reason I work in acrylics And that’s because they dry quickly And the way that I work, and this has taken me many, many years to learn And many experiments with other mediums like oil paints That I need things to dry I’m such an imperfect and erratic painter I don’t really know what I’m going to make before I start making it I make lots of mistakes And even to the point where I encourage mistake making Because I get really interesting effects and it fuels my ideas and experimentation engine And I have no real mind’s eye So I can envision what I want before I start making it So I sort of work very intuitively And I find that oil paints and their extreme slow dryingness Doesn’t at all suit how I want to need to work And then other mediums like watercolour are just so unforgiving So I tend to work with anything that’s sort of more plastic or acrylic based and fast drying So I do acrylic paints and collage with PVA glue and things like that In reasonable conditions will dry really quickly and are very forgiving mediums And if I make the sort of mistake that’s never going to be recoverable into something decent I can just paint over it And my paintings tend to be built up through layers and layers and layers of washes and glazes And it’s just how I’ve sort of settled into working It’s not for one of trying different approaches But every single time I seem to come back to this where I’m working So I can justify it however I might see fit There are many reasons I might explain as to why I work that way And why this is my technique and how I came to it But the reality of it is that I just gravitate back towards a way of working And every time I consciously move away from that I tend to gravitate straight back to it And it’s how and where I feel comfortable It’s what I feel comfortable doing And whether or not the results are what people want to see This is me, this is what I do and this is what I like doing And so I’m not immune to doing other things It’s just that this is where, this is my fulcrum and it’s my comfort zone And it’s also a medium and an approach that allows me to experiment And allows me to be quite, shall we say, erratic, aggressive And generally quite brutal with my materials It just suits who I am And so when we get to this time of the year And it’s cold and dank and damp and nothing’s drying It really throws out the window how I want to work And yeah for sure I could carve out the corner of my house And perhaps keep doing this stuff because it’s at least a bit warmer in there and drier But the other facet of my approach is that I’m quite messy And I would just destroy our house and probably drive my wife and family completely to distraction So I kind of have to work with the conditions that I’ve got And the exact same thing happened last year which was the first year that I had this studio My studio that I had before had some assemblage of insulation and was in general extremely dry So although a lot of these problems were assailing me with that space it was nowhere near as bad But this is what I’ve got and as I say I’m not going to look the gift horse in the mouth Because many people don’t get to have a dedicated space at all But it does mean that I have to change either the way that I work or the things that I am working on I simply can’t work the way that I’m used to working when it’s like this So as happened last year I sort of slowly curtailed my more pictorial representative painting And forked off into two different things One of which is woodworking I’m not going to go too much into that today but I’ve got piles of wood I’m a real squirrel when it comes to picking up random bits of wood and taking them home with me And so I’m always surrounded by bits of wood, old bits of tree branches and planks of wood that I’ve pulled out of skips and stuff I just like to go at them with my carving tools and I actually don’t produce that much stuff When I’m doing woodworking I did a whole bunch of carving and stuff and I’m okay actually, it’s fine I really enjoy the process, I find it really relaxing So I’ve not really produced much through the woodwork other than a whole bunch of sawdust this time round But I’ll keep going in and at it because I find it really really relaxing But the other thing that I ended up doing last year that I’m doing again now is a move into abstraction It was a bit subconscious but why I’m really doing this is that I need a method of working that doesn’t rely on fast drying In fact benefits from slow drying And so the other thing I love is I love working with acrylic inks and just using texture and organic mixing and dripping And just generally creating a wet canvas and just watching the drama of inks and paints unfolding As they mix and merge and dilute and pool and congeal and putting in different substances like PVA or varnish All sorts of things and then just letting it dribble and I really don’t want it to dry quickly I want it to spread across the canvas and to create all these weird dribbly marbling effects that I absolutely adore And I love it when I’ve made it and it’s dried and looks awesome because sometimes they dry in weird cracked ways But also I just love watching it happen It’s mesmerizing to me and I just really enjoy it I’ve never really understood abstraction I struggle with it because I never know when something is done I never know whether I really like it because I don’t really love other people’s abstract works And so I really love the process but I don’t know when to stop And I often end up just overdoing things and turning it into a horrible mush Because I’m enjoying the process too much I just don’t really stand back and look at what I’ve produced and whether or not I think it’s good or not And often when I ask myself that I don’t really know the answer but I don’t love it I don’t hate it, it’s just something I made that has little patches of wonderfulness in it And I really enjoyed doing And in some respects that’s just my whole approach to art But when I’ve produced a picture of a human face I’ll stand back and look at it and go Well that I think looks good Whereas when I’ve got a whole bunch of messy blobby marbled squirrely stuff on a canvas or a bit of wood It’s sort of hard for me to get my head around what I’ve produced Anyway, I think really my point here is less about abstraction And I’ve been dancing around the idea of doing one or more episodes of this podcast on abstraction And sort of going on a little bit of an abstraction odyssey which I think I will do But it’s not my point today, my point is sometimes you’ve just got to work with the constraints you’re given Sometimes you’ve got to make the most of the situation you’re in even though it might be unsatisfactory And those are the moments I think where you can be at your most creative Because as opposed to just sitting back and leaning into your comfort zone Which it might be happy comforting and pleasant and relaxing isn’t really pushing you in any direction And it isn’t really furthering your work and I think you can get quite bored and pedestrian And start to lose a bit of passion for your art if you’re never varying it I’m not here to tell you that the only good artists are the ones that are constantly pushing boundaries But all artists need to evolve I think you just need to evolve because otherwise it gets boring and it really shows in your work You’ll start to lose interest and it will start to show And so every now and again I think every artist needs to push themselves out of their comfort zone That doesn’t mean to say you’re going to do something wildly challenging It just means we’ll just try something different Now when is that moment to try something different? Well for me it’s when doing the thing that I usually do becomes nigh on impossible And so I start to move into abstraction and get a bit more of a feel for it And I like to think that although I certainly wouldn’t particularly rate my abstract works particularly highly I’ve certainly come a long way and I think I’ve got more of a feel for how I like to make abstract works And a bit of a style developing And when I look at some of my earlier abstract experiments I really prefer what I’ve done now I’d happily paint over those But I’m still not sure what I have is something concrete enough for me to want to put out there To get people’s opinions on to try and sell or to promote I’m not comfortable I don’t think I’m there yet I think I’ve got a way to go But I’m definitely moving in the right direction And I just would have stopped by now where there’s a little experiment Because I’d be drawn straight back into my comfort zone My comfort zone isn’t really viable at the moment So here I am being forced to do things that are not necessarily the things that I would choose to do And really enjoying it And finding myself really challenged by what it is I’m trying to achieve And how that reflects on my wider body of work And no doubt some of the things that I learn about my technique, my art My use of materials, my approach to composition and stuff Will make its way back into the main body of my work But slowly I’m starting to sort of learn and surface a bunch of stuff that starts to look like Viable art in its own right And to me that’s really exciting And does this have my fingerprints all over it? Yes, of course it literally does because I always get my hands dirty And it will have my signature on it at some point when I’m comfortable that it’s something I wish to share But I’m just not quite sure yet In fact I’m certain it isn’t Until that moment where I stand back and go Yes, that is the thing That whatever that is is what I wanted Whatever that is is something that I’m really happy and comfortable to share That I want to do more of that Then maybe that’s the moment that I put my signature on one of these And start showing it to everyone And I have not hit that point yet And I’ve digged through some of my pieces that I did last winter when I was in a similar position And they’re pretty cool, actually And there’s a lot of variation As I was sort of mixing up both woodworking and abstraction And using a lot of wet materials and so on I did some good stuff, I’m just not sure what it is I’m not sure what it represents And I need for my work to represent something And none of these pieces are getting binned Maybe some of them will be resurrected And some of them might be incorporated into other works at some point And I don’t throw anything away But yeah, back to the core thesis of this podcast It’s the process that counts And as much as I don’t like being cold and damp And I don’t like not being able to do my favourite type of work I’m really, really enjoying doing what I’m doing And maybe at some point I’ll actually start making it part of my main body of work But I think for the rest of you, I think it’s just a lesson in rolling with the punches, as it were With a lesson in doing the things that present themselves to you Regardless of whether or not it’s the thing you would usually do or that you’re comfortable with I think use the conditions you’re given, use the materials that you’re given If you don’t have money to buy new materials, use what you’ve got there Some stuff, some paints or some materials that you bought another time for another project But just sitting there unused because you wouldn’t usually work with stuff like that Or use it, paint over some old canvases or dig out some old experimental short stories Or do whatever it is that gives you a sense of being able to move forward And to be able to do something and just lean into the otherness of it And it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t produce anything of value This is not you changing everything up for permanent, for good It’s just you spreading your wings a bit further and incorporating something new and interesting Into your overall approach and style and technique So anyway I’m here, I’m freezing, it’s raining dreary and drizzly outside And I’m just thinking about what other surfaces I’ve got that I can start dribbling ink and paint down And how I can create texture and form from that And sort of looking forward to doing it more But you can damn well bet when the sun comes out as we get into spring things warm up a bit I’ll go back to the other stuff, but I’ll go back to it with a very new vigor with a fresh mind and fresh eyes And a whole bunch of new techniques and approaches and ideas that I perhaps wouldn’t have had otherwise So maybe you want to do something similar, maybe not Either way I’m getting back to it Enjoy, bye