Posts Tagged ‘studio’
Spinning Through
Spinning through
This perfectly messy world
Forgetting and remembering everything.
I am almost back from my tech vacation, it was nice! I actually made lots of stuff with my hands. Which I will write about soon. I have also tidied the studio and started making some new work, it is so helpful to be able to actually find your materials! I put all my paints and pigments in two lovely old wooden boxes, now I know what I have and what I need to get. I kept the stuff I like; such as nice pots and jars and got rid of the ugly ones, such as the plastic glass that was once used for black ink, that sat there for about two years. I rescued my hard paint clogged brushes with some old paint thinner which seems to work better than white spirits for recked brushes. Especially if you steep them for a few hours in it.
There has been lots going on in The Funny little Gallery, but more about that soon. We are open, so call in if you are in the mood for fun and creativity!
Studio doings!
This is a little collection of what I have been up to lately in the studio. The brown paper Poppy seed head I wrote about in my last blog, it is the one that I stitched. The drawing is of how my heart felt while I was drawing over and over again, I had just been meditating! The most resent things that I have done are these long boxes on the left and below. I rescued them while I was doing the recycling, originally they had tubes of oil paint in them, it seemed fitting to make them into art! Inside are rolled up thick paper napkins. I have written things like memories and happenings that I consider to be precious. One of them is about the little things that happen to lead us to certain places.I like the idea of them being stored carefully in these boxes. It was as if they were made especially to fit them, and I just happen to have two of each!
Risk taking and heart expression
Lately there has been plenty risk taking and heart expression going on in the studio of the secret gallery! I was painting with our children again, it was great, exhausting but great! It is said that we are all born artists it is as we grow up that allot of us loose it, but Clement Greenberg said that child prodigies exist in other art forms but not visual art. I wonder why he felt that it was different to say music? I am not sure how I feel about it. I wrote an essay on Greenberg and Modernism it was a very long time ago though! I recall him being an advocate of art for arts sake, referring to itself and not the external world, like American Abstract Expressionism. Sometimes this is can be like a more considered form of how a child paints, in a way, but developing it to something beyond haphazard play, or at least being conscious that you are trying to paint like a child! Many of us spend many years trying to learn how to not paint like a child and then we have to start forgetting again! It seems for allot of artists to be an important process; you learn and then you shuffle around what you want to remember and what you want to forget! You change the scales of importance in a way, this bending and flexing is often very playfully. This begs the question does age or maturity have much to do with visual art? If a child makes a beautiful painting, does it mean less than if an adult painted it? How much does a child have to express? What about reincarnation then?! if it does exist, I wonder if the great artists of the past are making visual art now?!
The paintings we have been working and playing on are not finished yet, but they are looking promising. I have worked with many different elements before; including doing set ups in nature where the wind or rain made the marks but now we have children and they love making all sorts of marks! The three of us work on the canvas. I like taking risks with my work and pushing it beyond where is has been. Painting with the children has been a really interesting direction for me. It is also a careful balancing act between keeping them happy and enjoying painting and working with their marks to help it come to a new level; they have something I don’t have and I have something that they don’t have so, we are a good team! I have the years, plenty to express and years of practice! They have the have the magic marks that are not self conscious; they are very free. With painting sometimes you have to risk totally loosing it to make something better. One of the paintings I was working on I liked but know it had further to go I offered it to our children, with hesitation, allowing them to change its direction forever! The other painting is looking a little bit like a Cy Twombly, I love his work, to put it very simply, it is like some of the most beautiful scribbles and dribbles you have ever seen, powerful and delicate at the same time! I wonder will anyone come and kiss it as one woman did to a Cy Twombly painting!
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