The secret gallery’s blog

Work in Progress oil on canvas Marianne Slevin

There has been a lot of Alan Watts recorded chatter going on around here lately. Alan Watts was a very entertaining philosopher. The book  is called “Your it!” James gave it to me for my Birthday, he also gave me “Empowering Women” by Louise L. Hay, I have been really enjoying both of them. What really struck me from the very beginning of both books was that the authors said “I am not a healer” Louise L. Hay and “I am not a guru” Alan Watts, it is all about you. I like this attitude. What I also realized was that I want to be “digging the now” as Alan Watts puts it, when it comes to making art and doing it because I am really enjoying doing it, not to try to be good or make work to impress people. This my seem obvious but when I heard it, it made me rethink. There is so much pressure on artist trying to look and sound coherent particularly for commercial galleries that much of the enjoyment of making art is lost. Artists whose work was once exciting and unselfconscious becomes dull, tripping over itself.  What is the point unless you are enjoying it! I know I enjoy making art but somehow I never fully realized just how important that was before. I wanted to make good work before, now I don’t care who thinks it is good or not I am just doing it because I enjoy it. I feel like I have defiantly lost a couple of wrinkles!

This sounds really simple but what happens then is that what you enjoy doing one moment changes and you become bored and have to keep finding the new things to keep you surprised and entertained. Each different painting will have many different stages of enjoyment in it. With the piece that I have been working on for the past two months on and off, more off than on! I painted until I ran out of excitement and then I stopped, I looked at it many times to see if I know what to do with it, not until yesterday was I able to and today I really enjoyed bringing something else to it that I didn’t have before.  It is constantly moving and shifting like everything else. There are challenging times when you are not enjoying it and you are wondering how to! For me every painting is unique and you have to kind of trick yourself to get out of your own way and let it happen. The allure of paintings for me is not in the obvious or the details but the magical symphony that happens when you soften your gaze and disengage your rational brain for a while!

“Angel” Work in progress, oil on canvas Marianne  Potterton 2009

These are the two paintings that I am working on at the moment in thee studio. The one above I think is finished or very nearly, but you never know, I might do something more to it. I had an urge to put it up in the Secret Gallery yesterday, but I think I will wait till it dries!

Work in progress, “No Formula”, oil on canvas Marianne Potterton 2009

Thank goodness for spell check! I must go and spell it right in the painting now! This is a bit bolder than my usual paintings, I think. It is a sort of attempt to paint in the moment, a sort of meditation, as Alan Watts once said about meditation “Digging the present, grooving with the eternal now!”

Much art seems to be latching on to the past, artists repeating what they know they are good at, but they are not in it any longer. When I go to an exhibition and all of the work looks the same I wonder has the artist just found a formula ? Of course there are exceptions to this, where the art can look very similar but the artist was still open and aware while making it. Such as Mark Rothko, I just could not do it though; do the same sort of thing for years. I even find it hard to finish a painting without wanting to paint it differently the next time I go back to it ! This unknown territory can feel a bit uncomfortable because we have never been there before, it can be a bit hit and miss, but what can come out of these adventures have more life in them than art we make on the journeys that we have repeated with only slight deviations!

Yesterday morning I walked the old green Road, or at least some of it, between Fanore and Ballyvaughan. I noticed as I walked over the extremely uneven ground while looking up and around me, my feet knew how to place themselves on the earth, is this not a little strange, can our feet detect the lay of the land? I tested myself and made sure I could not see the what surface my feet would land on, it felt like they somehow knew how to land on the unpredictable surface of small rocks and earth I started running and it was amazing I still did not fall! I am not saying that it a larger bolder was in front of me that I would not run into it, but I believe that it is more then just our finely tuned bodies. The more logical among you will say that this is what our bodies are designed to do and it is nothing to do with anything metaphysical. I believe that it is both our physical bodes and our metaphysical bodies.I have been set the challenge of proving it! To me it is not only logical but impossible not to be so if we are indeed all part of the same thing, my finger knows what my hand is doing so why should not a person know where the surface of the earth is?

I enjoyed singing out loud, and watching the stone walls, they looked so playfully built; not formal but inventive and ever changing. I thought about leaving our sons sunglasses looking out through the hole in the wall, but decided that I better not leave something that would turn into litter even if it started off as art! I have been attempting to be much more playful in every day living including my art. I looked down the hill and saw a huge ledge of rock like a cart and was not sure if I saw or imagined a cart wheel where one should be if it were really a cart! I have been listening to lots of lectures by the late Alan Watts and really enjoying them. James my partner, started me off on them and now I think they are great, and very funny! I would really recommend them.

Sometimes children make more sense. Our two year old son, just said “I have some dirt in my rainbow,” he meant eyebrow! but today I feel like I have some dirt in my rainbow! My car dug it’s heals in and refused to move away from the bank in Ennistymon, I had just given it a rest for a couple of days and maybe it was insulted that I had thought of it as a gas guzzling monster! Or maybe it was my karma. I have been listening to some Eastern philosophy podcasts by Alan Watts. James, my partner recommended them to me, they are fantastic lectures that have been recorded many years ago.

Today, the lecture I listened to, described us living in a phantasmagoria! What a great word and world! In another lecture Alan Watts talked about the pitfalls of announcing that you are on a trying-to-do-something-good path! Basically all your karma comes quickly, very quickly! the trick is not to announce it to the world or even yourself! If you act without thinking about it first you can avoid this negative karma! I think the car breaking down today as an example of this: I said that, “I want to reduce my carbon foot-print and drive the car less”, the next time I drove it, it brakes down! So more action less thinking! Today I am making no claims to do anything better! At least, not that I am going to mention to myself!