'So'...

I've been rooting through my zounds and galloons of drawings from the last couple of years... my 'A4 paper' period... my picture blog period... there are so many, and so many of them are so frenzied. I have so often been so eager to move onto the 'next phase' and get things 'evolved'... itching to be doing the elusive fun, clever, soulful drawings that are the supposed culmination of my work. But I'm pretty sure I don't always go about this process of 'getting in a satisfying zone' in the most efficient way.

(It's good when I make sufficiently READABLE so that at least I if no one else can tell what's going on when I look back at them. As long as the something that is there is somewhat translatable.)

I have been guilty of an excess of impatience. I guess it's a deeper rooted frustration with my perceived chronic failiures and the need to create something perfect as soon as possible. Definitely some strong urge to overcompensate going on.

So anyway, it seemed proper to focus on the sheets of tiny little drawings that I tend to start with, unceremoniously. In a rush. Impatient. I was looking at some of these sheets and realising that there is a LOT of dynamism and pure potential compositional fun on these sheets, most of which I somehow failed ever to translate to full sized finished chance-for-perfection drawings or paintings.

The tiny drawings work because there is no stage fright for me in the tiny spaces.

They work because in the tiny spaces, I can be quite bold and intuitive with design and with marks wthout even being self conscious about doing it. And the little boxes can be sequential or interrelate in a potentially infinite, but controlled, number of ways.

Yesterday I tried taking one or two little drawings on a sort of a cowboy hatted Brokeback Mountain theme, and relocating and reinterpreting them in a slightly bigger box... if the first box was 6 by 5 centimetres, the second was like... a small sixth of a page of A4. There's specific for you. And it's hard, to translate the particular miniature dynamism I struck on by accident in tiny flickers of the fingers, onto a bigger scale without just copying, and hopefully with 'evolving' into something more multidimensional and satisfying and bulbous and funny and finished. It's balancing the happy 'intuitions' in shape already achieved with some sense of tangible form, life, and whatever humour or soul or appeal is the very nub of what I'm after. Such balancing makes my best drawing require jolly intense concentration.

But I think the very subtle newish thing I'm trying to say is that in the initial tiny drawings, I am uniquely unselfconscious, uniquely excited by in the kind of fertile bog of pregnant possibilities... scrabbling around in a pure joyful field of ideas. And I think I mean 'ideas' in the way that David Lynch talks about ideas. Like they visit themselves upon you and you fall in love with them... you become possessed by them and see them through to the end... or you do if you're him. If you're me you get a bit flustered in the middle because you haven't learned how to meditate.

I've never been comfortable with making huge things or making stuff in three dimensions. I remember the abject terror of the few weeks of wood design lessons at crap school. I knew I could not do it. I just sat paralysed with dread hoping I would become invisible and that it would just END.

All that hellishness at school, I dreamed of art college and the my glorious liberated future in which I would receive justice... glory in proportion to my talent and hard work.

I cannot make stuff out of hard things.

I like fluidity... I associate it with freedom... the fluidity of that 'ideas field'. I put that into my lines. 2 dimensions are the only portal I require to potentially infinite dimensions. Three seem really restrictive.

But what's the fun of staring at miniscule spaces on cheap pieces of paper when there's such a beautiful world outside our windows? Because it's a world of dread and fear! (Quoting Band Aid). No of course it's not a world of dread and fear. Except in the circumstances of shit wood school times I just described. The big wide world is beautiful and especially in the countryside, all the wideness and light and openness of air encircling your head, what more could you want, if you spent all day out in it you'd probably be happy like a new lamb in paradise, there would be no call for art to mediate things. Yet I get my kicks making shapes on a tiny piece of paper... so there must be some unresolved gubbins between us and paradise.

Perhaps the tinier the space, the more akin to pure 'thought' it is for me. The tinier it is, the further it is from being a clunking physical thing that requires physical negotiation. And physical negotiation is something I instinctively find slightly painful, being An Arthritic. But there's no such thing as pain in the Tiny Spaces.

Jeez! I don't want the blog-possiblities-tangibility juggling to slip away from me. Just leaving it a couple more days could be fatal! Already the shortlist of themes in my head are getting all muddled and my own notes are becoming disconnected from the 'rich seam of truth' I usually felt brewing at the moment I jotted them downwards.

A lady came to our house on Monday, a lady from the Office of National Statistics, to interview Bob and I about our standard of living.

She was very nice and non judgmental about the fact that I work sixty hours a week doing scribbles and make no money, as they always have been, non-judgemental that is.

But she said about the drawings on the wall 'They look like gargoyles'.

Which was interesting as a first impression.

What are gargoyles and are my drawings like them and if so, why?

Does it fit with what I've been INTENDING with the drawings?

(Does the 'flattery issue' enter into this or should I keep that separate?)

Hey I just had a thought:

I CAN WRITE ABOUT WHAT THINGS LOOK LIKE

John's jaw, gargoyles... they provoke unique thoughts in my interior bonce.... something like what 'happens' in an ideally living lively drawing or painting... a rich seam of temporary ease...

See I had a wider thought about what it is 'for me' to convey in my writing and drawing... I was watching the bit of the Culture Show from the Saturday with Karl Pilkington and Noel Fielding talking about Noel Fielding's new exhibition of his paintings... (The full clip has Karl going to the Hayward Gallery exhibition of 'funny contemporary art' first which is another can of worms, which I won't uncork today)... but anyway I was thinking about Noel and him being the kind of person who appeals to the youngsters, and him being a person readily accepted as a London high tier socialite cool kids quasi self aware ersatz rock star type thing. I was thinking he got people's affection and their lust and attention by putting across his imagination and his humour on the Boosh. And how that helps people be interested in his paintings and gives him a sort of headstart with doing his exhibition, with publicity and being his own crossover type thing and not strictly dealing within the art world and its expectations.

So I think it's nice to think that somehow getting people on side by giving them something of the good stuff of your interior life is alright... and that if you do something like that, if you are in some way, individually, visually or verbally or moodally articulate about the real truth of the goodies from your interior life, you've got a sort of headstart that's about obvious things like charisma and affection and actual communication, not about the fake esotericism of the art world and its convincing people to take it on trust that there is something there when there isn't.

I have a lot of anxiety dreams where I shout in my sleep something like 'There's nothing there! There's nothing therrrrre!' It has become a strong visceral theme.

But what I'm thinking now is, what is my SOMETHING? What is my thing that is there? How can I make that as vivid as possible?

So the nice ladies who visit that house can see it, if they want to?

It's relevant to note that Noel Fielding does it in a very non slaggy offy non angry sort of an apolitical not taking himself seriously not bitter about his art school experience type way. Or that's how it appears. By contrast maybe I find it hard to be so easy going and be friends with Razorlight. He is expert at mocking things with affection. His whole persona-presentation is a sort of affectionate mockery.

So anyway... what is my Something, and what has it got to do with gargoyles?

Well, firstly, my drawings are like gargoyles in that they can involve grotesque distortions, and they cross breed people and people's expressions with parts and aspects of animals. In fact when I googled 'gargoyles', they are often lumped in with 'grotesques' and also the Green Man, who I have had brushings with.

Here are some factual type fascinating fact type reasons why gargoyles may be an apt comparison:

1. Apparently Greeks and Romans found fossils of long dead things, like dinosaurs, and thought that they were dead mythic monsters from their myths. Some of the big bones they thought were human bones, so they concluded that people had shrunk and got weak and piffling since the old days (When they were virile giant gods... yum!). Anyway, gargoyles are somewhere between dinosaurs and myths, which I like. I also like that these things result from the interface of ancient people with even more ancient things, and the ancient imaginations being stirred by the super ancient odds and sods.

2.

Gargoyles and grotesques have always given carvers and sculptors a chance to delight in their creativity and to explore the possibilities in the dance between stone and imagination. Gargoyles freed carvers from the limits imposed by other types of carving, and this was especially true in the Middle Ages. It is certain that stone carvers love creating these pieces, and viewers certainly love seeing them. This may be one of the more compelling reasons they exist.

So they're the pure fun of invention and a liberated imagination.

3. They were part of the way churches conveyed their message to illiterate people... which gives them a solid unambiguous purposefulness which is attractive as an antidote to contemporary doubt and spurious obscurity. So they're purposeful and faithful and fun... but still kinda mysterious, as they come from long dead anonymous individual soulminds.

There's a kind of freedom in being ugly, isn't there.
Bob and I were noting when there was one of those body dysmorphic pretty girls on This Morning who thought she was ugly, that only attractive people seem to get really unhappy about looks. It seems like plain looking people just accept that it's not their thing and get on with their lives, whereas pretty people go all mental because they're tantalisingly close to perfection but for a couple of flaws, or something like that. I'm half pretty enough to recognise that. And I think often for women, self esteem goes up and down so one minute you can feel like a fragrant vision of radiant loveliness and in the next minute, a muddy frump toad.

But if you're a munter, you're free from all that crap. Yay!

You can concentrate on having a beautiful soul.

In terms of drawing there is freedom in finding the ugliness, even in attractive human subjects, breaking away from the mathematical strictures of beauty. But I think if I do use ugliness I try to make it a sort of soulful ugliness, where I am seeing 'through it' to a certain beauty beneath, a spiritedness; or at least the lines, the curves, the shapes, the drawing itself is beautiful on its own terms, even if the subject comes out somewhat battered.

If you love someone or have a crush on them, I find I want to get to grips with the truth of their mushes, imperfections, potentials, distinctness and unique angles, bumps and crevices.. unique design features, unique gargoyle-sowing-soil.

My drawings aren't like gargoyles in that they are two dimensional... but there's some interestingness in this banality....

For a while I've been excited by the idea of achieving a 'monumentality' in my modestly sized two dimensional drawings, but monumentality through fluidity, monumentality through an 'organic' process of invention... to create something that seems as if or IS as if it's always existed. Gargoyles cheat a bit with that because a lot of them have existed for a mega long time. And there is something enticing about lichen and decay and erosion.

It's nice that the medieval chaps were able to have maximum inventive fun in stone, which seems so permanent.

Perhaps the next thing is to get deeper into productions that are simultaneously fluid, monumental and alive...

OK, so with this Bob picture I've been painting for a deadline, it's been a break from recent habits, I have stuck to it and stuck to it even when I doubted it and when I didn't like it or didn't feel like doing it or had a sort of dilemma with it.

Rather than being swayed by my whims and doubts and fragilities and impatiences.

(Ye Olde softness there)

making me think about shapes and feelings and ultimo paint world creation and defiant softness

'It's all rather soft isn't it.'

I have these bitter memories of a tutor saying that sort of thing in my A level years, I perceived a sort of prejudice against the superficial implications of my soft finishes. Well, this was my theoretical objection to the objection: that the soft finishes were frowned upon/sniffed at because they signified an amateurish feminine kitteny namby pambyness, and demonstrated that I had not yet learned the superficial signifiers of contemporaryness and professionalism in contemporaryness: fast light, splashiness, sharp edges, sexless unisexness, ironic/'intellectual' detachment from imagery. I perceived that instead, I was wanting to engage warmly with my imagery and sort of 'feel it out'... I knew I didn't even want to play the professionalism-in-contemporaryness art games that my tutors only non-explicitly tried to shove me into, because everything's got to be kept nice and obscure at art school, because if people spoke the truth about what was happening, everyone would suddenly wake up and want to leave.

And this is still what I have found myself doing with the Bob painting, this 'defiant' softness.

Though who am I defying now?

Having said all that, perhaps that interpretation of the 'It's all rather soft isn't it' critique, which is now, after all, a distantly remembered utterance, is a defensive, or an inaccurate interpretation of the intention of the original utterer.

I can't know the original intention, I can't even remember much of the context, but I have by myself in the intervening years developed my own objections to my own 'softness'. Perhaps there are times when my softness is too namby pamby and feminine for my own tastes. Perhaps there are times when it's a bit of a cop out from making more manly decisions.

But this time, perhaps it's OK and it comes quite naturally to me in a way that's good.

Perhaps it's a good way to counteract the blankness of a lot of the BP portrait entrants. it's a good way to play to 'my strengths'... things I'm well-versed at. Things I'm a bit defiant about.

Like being girly and soft like a cloud of fragrance or a kitten's tummy.

Technically, and even in terms of taking the sophistication of my own drawings into dense layered painting, it's not perfect, it's not Nerdrum, but it is at least sincere. Remember, I had reached the end of my tether and was happy to have the strength to do something proper with a start and a finish and a deadline and the whiff of competition.

I am against blankness in portraits as a signifier of contemporaryness.

I think it's nice to have the courage to show some 'feeling'.

Interpret that how you will.

Doing a straight subject makes me think about what I could achieve taking my more inventive shapes into a slower painting process or a deeper finish.

it makes me think that in some ways I would have liked it to be a just a really long winded careful elaborate drawing, and colour feels a little clumsy to me right now, but this potential separation is a subject for another day.

It is good to learn the meaning of hard work and become a donkey for a while.

Been meaning to do this for a while: responses to the beginning of this blog (1st October 2005).

And why? To see how I've changed, what's become clearer and all the ideas I had and never did... and what my WRITING was like, as reluctant as I am to admit that all this writing that I write is Writing.

The red quotes are from entry number one, 1st October 2005.

I’ll tell you what, I’ll let you in on some of the things that I am doing today, and some of the things that I am thinking of today.

That's probably never a bad place to start from. No shortage of thoughts, and sometimes writing them down is all it takes to start brewing them into THEORIES and CONCLUSIONS.

This morning I walked to the gym and I wore some new gym trousers that exposed a bit more calf than any of my previous ones. I was completely unnecessarily self-conscious about this. They show music video channels at the gym. I feel favourable toward Girls Aloud today, for my own funny little reasons. I think largely because of their lack of pretence, and the thoughtful colour coordination that has informed their latest video. I have an aversion in particular to humourless pop music, I am increasingly realising. Though I think it’s in a pretty comprehensively dire state, there are degrees and subtleties of badness and immorality and teeny glimmers of human spirit that are worth making note of.

So here I was sprinkling in a bit of personal stuff about being self conscious about my seldom seen leg bottoms, maybe instinctively feeling like all lofty abstractions seems pretentious, but mixing up all that with a a bit of feminine cripple pathos might be a nice palatable combo.

In the intervening time Girls Aloud have got a bit less fun again, since that sort of Biology era with the pink dresses, surprisingly haven't split up, and Bob's favourite changed from Nadine to Kimberley after Nadine got quite thin and fashiony and Kimberley's bottom got quite round. We tend to agree that Nadine is the most beautiful one but maybe not the most 'accessible' to the average man. I think my favourite might be Cheryl in a funny sort of way, I quite like her. She's very pretty in a sort of doll footballer wife way but it's not that her looks appeal to me so much, I think I decided once that she was quite no nonsense and I liked that, even though I am quite all nonsense. But maybe in terms of potential drawing subjects my favourite is still Nicola the red haired one, she has the most interesting face and colouring and the softest hair.

Paul Morley might think that Girls Aloud are signs of bad times in a good way, or something, I can't remember exactly. He had some subtle moral point to make.

But yes I do still go to the gym and watch the pop videos and have thoughts about them, but sometimes when I'm in a more judgemental not suffering fools gladly Roger Kimball mood, I reckon my mind should be on higher things and it's all very well blogging about Kimberley's bottom but where does that leave us. Is it really the best use of my faculties.

Maybe it's a little cowardly to be all aw shucks and all cute and pretend-bumbling. To focus on trivial ephemeral stuff for its own sake. Maybe it's trying to duck the responsibility to use my intellect to achieve something good, something fine or subtle. Of course there's always the hope that trivial ephemeral observations can be sort of extrapolated into more substantial thoughts; but it is kind of a trap, being too cute, submitting to a kind of low self esteem which may be just part of a rather lame persona.

I live a half hour walk from the Bridport leisure centre and the weather was spectacularly noisy and changeable today. The walk is along quiet country roads. I’m afraid it’s very beautiful. There are a few blackberries left. Suspicious late blackberries. Slightly fermenting. But one gets hungry walking back from the gym.

This always sticks in my mind when I walk past the blackberry bushes, I remember that my first blog was October 2005 at the very tail end of the blackberry season, which was my first blackberry season living here and in retrospect a very good and abundant blackberry season. I collected gallons of blackberries in big heavy bags and made cheesecake.

One thing about writing thoughts down is that you can see in front of you how good you are at thinking, or how good you are at thinking on a particular day. When you're carrying it all around, you can imagine it's all really profound stuff without quite the right outlet, but as soon as you write it down or even say it, you realise how limited or banal it can seem... or maybe I realise that I haven't yet reached the final point of my thought, the useful part; and I need to get a little more committed, hunker down, and take full responsibility for the implications of my thought in order to get there.

I am compiling a list of questions that I am frequently asked about my paintings and that still always throw me and make me say monumentally stupid things. Then whilst still compiling the potentially endless list of stupid/obvious questions, I’m attempting to formulate honest but concise soundbitey answers. This process was triggered by my learning that someone wishes to make a short film about me and my work, and I would rather not come across like either a dullard or a curmudgeon, so I will attempt to sharpen my wits.

Now here were some things that didn't happen. Haven't happened. The person making the film about me didn't. And I never achieved satisfactory soundbitey answers, I think partly because I got quite into blogging and it felt like long meandering explorations at my own leisure and as time and nature permitted, were more true and possibly more communicative than soundbitey answers for the time being. Or that I myself didn't know what the answers were until I asked myself the questions good and proper. That and the fact that I have almost phobically avoided the people who ask those questions. 'What kind of paintings do you do?' It's not that stupid a question really. I was talking to my parents' no nonsense friend Ceddy when I was staying in Rugby for the Mick convention and I remembered that I do need answers to those questions still, it's common sense. And common sense makes sense in small doses.

And in fact, tackling clichés is a bit of a larger theme for me just now. I've been writing with the aim of disentangling some of my hang-ups about the monstrously insular Art World, and some of its potential hang-ups about me, and the thing I have come to realise again and again is that the problems I have arise from complacent, stagnant habits of language and description. There’s no getting away from it, I am going to have to get analytical on their ass.

Hmmm... I think now I am less inclined to get analytical on their ass. I'm not sure it behoves me any longer to be so riddled with angst about the ways of the art world. I wonder if such angst is in a funny way holding onto an implicit belief or a fear that the art world does conceal a sort of sophisticated esoteric superior way to truth and hipness that I'm too stupid and old fashioned to understand. When it doesn't. I think maybe since October 2005, the art world seems a bit more transparent to me, and a bit less worth bothering with... certainly less worth bothering with being angry about the whole monolithic thing. Not because it's not anger-worthy but because really it's good for my health to rise above such visceral pain-responses... that make me sweat and flail in a most unbecoming fashion. In fact it's been interesting getting back in touch with what Matthew Collings thinks about the art world these days, because he seems to be both objective, taking individual things and artists on their merits, but also has an underlying... maybe not anger, but an underlying sense of broader wrongness... and degradation... being in 'lesser times' or something... he may be more damning of it in some ways than I am, because his understanding may be deeper. He has the relativism and that thing that's the opposite of relativism pretty well balanced, which is the trick of a clever person.

I suppose there's a difference between saying 'we are in lesser times therefore we can't hope to do anything that's greater than the time we're in' and saying 'We are in lesser times and having recognised this we really ought ot be looking for ways to get greater again'.

It's funny, though I have less interest in punishing the art world's ass with my righteous brain manglings, I may have more interest in tentatively poking myself back into it, because I want to be an artist. And one thing there's a lot of in the art world is money, and one thing that art world worshippers are is suggestible. So I feel like it's best to ditch the sense of taking on the whole thing by myself like a Knight in moral terms and in pursuit of Truth and all that, or even like the little boy shouting about the emporer being naked... because my tasks were contradicting and hampering eachother back there, which is silly. I will write down my thoughts so other people might read them, do the best art I can according to all the criteria I can comprehend, and try to put it physically where people can see it and buy it... that's all. That's it.

Complications and cliches and lies and stupidity can get to me, but they're not solely my responsibility to conquer, and there is good stuff, lots of good stuff, and good souls, to counteract that sense of isolated bitterness. I feel I'm more in touch with these good souls now, they're a stronger web in my imagination.

I am currently tackling answers to the question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ which to be fair is not exclusive to art or the art world and needs to be dealt with swiftly and with gusto, I would think.

I still don't know where to begin with this. Maybe a different answer every day like when the Beatles got asked what their favourite food was by teen magazines. Scampi. Fruitellas. Chelsea buns.

One last thing about that first ever entry:

The picture I put in was the Conspiration of the Bataves by Rembrandt, which is the other thing about it that stuck in my mind. I was quite taken with the picture at that particular time. In my memory, I think I imagined that I wrote something about the picture too, but I didn't, I just used it as my illustration. I loved the roughness and mystery and potential violence about the picture. I loved it because it's a great painting by a great artist and I had just developed the senses to recognise why. In retrospect, there was a time when I defiantly set fanciful challenges for myself that were too lofty for my self-educated hands and mind to really take on. Recognising that something is great is one thing, skipping straight to making something 'great' is another. I think at that time I didn't quite know how to have the actual commitment to learn about things so rich and complex, to learn FROM them, to aspire to them, commit to them, study them. I've learned a little bit more about the practicalities of how to learn now. And about what craft means. I threw around ideas about doing those things, which I'm still guilty of, throwing around more ideas than I can realistically commit to... I suppose that's no sin.

But there's a balance to strike. I don't want to be a sarcastic postmodern drone who says we've gone past greatness now and live in shrivelled times and we can only do things that are secondary and pleasureless and miserly and amateurish. And do sort of low key quirky superficially cute things in a way that's cowardly, shying away from testing my limits. And I don't want to be the version of myself with low self esteem, where I lack the belief and the physical strength to finish things or aspire to grand things. I need to be able to pitch somewhere between unachievable ineffable genius greatness and fake self-effacing non-trying safety cushions... somewhere that is a TRUE reflection of the maximum my talent can achieve. Whatever that is. Whatever that looks like.

But there was a time when it was valid for me to make the statements 'I think Rembrandt is worth aspiring to' or 'I'm not scared to pick apart the myths of the art world'. It was timely just to throw up those possibilities.

In this pretend world where I'm important (crawl, self-efface, face in mud, mumble, stab self in nose)

Here's a little message I wrote to my friend Greg Oakes after a long message that he sent to me after a short slightly flustered message I sent to him.

Continuing the trickle of less elaborate blogs. I have a couple of bigger themes brewing.

(Greg drew this about being addicted to Facebook. The other artwork on this post is also his.)

----

Hi Greg

I loved your message. It made me cry. I'm sorry for the delayed response too.

I loved it because you understood what I meant.

This path can be incredibly hard sometimes,more than I ever anticipated, because there seems to be no let-up, and I know I'm meant to do THIS thing but then there are a lot of selling things and strategies that I'm either completely duck-out-of-water about or really unsure and ambivalent about. And the original 'calling' can get sort of squashed under a lot of desperation and self doubt. I don't ever doubt my work as such, but I'm an imperfect vessel.

I think probably I am emerging from a down period (brain wise) and looking to get a bit less ambivalent about certain things and take some action... I'm not short of theories and strategies. Short on certainty and action. And sometimes it seems little changes could change everything... I'm not doing everything wrong, I'm just not doing some of the right things, if you see what I mean. I do stick by a lot of the decisions I've made about what to do and what not to do, because it's always felt like too much compromise to some half guessed idea of what other people expect would render the whole thing pointless. It's a very strange business.

And I really wish you great success with your gallery lady... whatever happens, I'm sure you're a great stay at home Dad, and there's no shame in that. I'd love to have kids. Sometimes I'd just like to be a bumbling housewife, and quit being a failed entrepreneur. it hurts to constantly feel pressured to perform a role I feel I'm completely incompetent at. But that was never the point, the point was trying to be an artist, and there was some real meaning to that decision.

Anyway, maybe I'll contact you again soon to talk about more concrete specific stuff or something.

Much love,

Chloe

(It is a curious thing... why does trying to be an artist feel like a moral thing, or some act of faith, of ineffable values? Why does certain 'compromise' make the whole thing fall down and squash the enlivening spark? When from a certain angle, all you're talking about is drawing one thing instead of drawing another thing... how can that be moral? How can it wear you down? It doesn't always... but it's a possibility. Why cling so hard to these elusive magics? It has something to do with the value of real freedom...)