So what do you make drawings about? In the posts I’ve put up
so far I’ve tried to make you all aware of drawing as a broad church, a wide
area of investigation. But that’s very similar to putting up posts that
demonstrate that writing covers many styles and formats. It is very obvious and
shouldn’t really need stating, but you have to start somewhere and one of the
things that I was very aware of was that people had a quite narrow view of what
could constitute fine art practice within the drawing strand.
I believe that we all have experiences and that what artists
do is reshape those experiences and process them through a medium, such as a
book or play or a drawing. They use this
process to communicate to others something that has been understood or felt
about whatever the experience was. I am a strong believer that life is full of
an infinite series of possibilities and that in order to make sense of these
you need to focus and sift through them and only by constructing frameworks of
meaning can we negotiate our way through the infinite number of possible
choices that life throws our way.
My personal issues are centred on how media news affects me
and how my everyday experiences of Leeds shape my day-to-day life. For instance
this weekend I went foraging for mushrooms, I spent time walking through
woodland corridors on the very edge of suburbia and found food to eat in the
middle of January. Mushrooms and green leafed plants are thriving due to the
warmer climate and as I walk and pick and draw, my mind drifts towards how I
can make images of this experience and what these might mean. I get home and
turn on the radio and I’m saturated with news and views surrounding the
shootings in Paris. Both these experiences begin to fuse together and I’m aware
that everyone else listening to the news will be forced to make decisions about
how to think about fundamentalism and terrorism. I’m also still a lecturer in
fine art. I spend a vast amount of my time thinking about drawing as a fine art
practice and this too is part of my experience, this too will be part of what
I’m trying to communicate, which is why I’m often looking at visual language and
asking questions as to how and why it works as it does.
The hard thing for me as an artist is to shape and fuse
together various experiences. When I was younger I used to privilege certain
experiences over others, some I tended to use within my practice and others I
kept separate because I felt they weren’t the stuff of artworks. As I get older
I realise that all of life is open to being thought about and communicated
about in an art-form of one sort or another. But some things are better
communicated as a novel or a play and others as images or songs. Some things
work best within a combination art form such as film or performance art. My
mistake has often being to try and use one form when another one would have
been better, this is why I would always recommend working in several ways at
once so that even though you may be better at one form than another, you get a
feeling for how the different possibilities for communication might work.
Perhaps the hardest question you can be asked is, “What is
your work about?” but at some point you will need to become obsessed with
something. When I was young I realised that I was obsessed with art and art and
its processes became for several years the subject of my work. As I got older
things changed but I would suggest that that is natural, the toys of youth are
not the same as the things of old age.
So going back to my present dilemma. What do I draw, how do
I make images relevant to today? My interest in plant and fungus life perhaps
being something I can deal with using botanical illustrative forms, perhaps
maps might help me identify where these things occur. But how to deal with the
sense of impending doom I get when I turn on the news? This will take a lot
more work.
I’ve mentioned before that drawing has many languages and I
think that is its great richness and fascination. How these can be combined to
create a unique voice or signature is something that only comes through in the
making. But as you make, as you draw and work through its ranges of
possibilities, perhaps it helps if you can accept the fact that it’s OK to
include all and any of your experiences of life. So many students I have spoken
to in the past have reserved certain areas of their lives as non-art territories
and in reality it is often in those very territories that the richest materials
for art making will be found.
Some of my recent walks have taken me past tower blocks, the
drawings I did of them are now being processed and are going through an editing
stage, whereby I assess how well or badly they communicate my feelings. I have
to make work to find out what I am doing, but this isn’t enough, I also have to
edit and make choices about directions to take the work into, and these
responsibilities are of course common to everyone who wants to make fine art
images.
The next stage will be to build these images into larger more complex visual narratives, ones that have an allegorical message that I want them to have. But that is my business and not necessarily yours, your job is to identify somewhere to start and this is often by focusing on something that you have noticed or come across already but just hadn't thought it worthwhile as an 'art' subject. My last word on this is to beware of art, looking at other artist's work has a way of taking you down certain paths that are pretty well worn, life is nearly always more interesting.
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