Week two of 2012 and I'm battling my annual cold, between a commission which I cannot share and a self portrait (which I want not to just yet). I've also been trying to bring Rise to completion-Trying being the operative...a perfect case of disconnect between whats on the canvas and in the minds eye.
Will Rise be my fall? Pun not withstanding.
What do other artists do at such times I wonder? Persevere stoically or make a pyre of failure? That could be an encapsulation of the creative process right there. As well as a splendid title for a painting. I'll carry on regardless.
"Carry on painting"...now there's a movie I'd love to see. Sid James as an old spiv Art dealer, Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jaques as sniffy collectors, Jim Dale would be the undiscovered Art ingenue and Babs Windsor his muse. It would all have to descend into a nude covered in paint farce, Yves Klein style of course.
Perhaps Damien Hirst should option the rights for his next post modern foray into celluloid. He could re-title it "Ooer Misses."
I digress,forgive me it's the fever-Sid James and Yves Klein all in the same post, what a cocktail.
In the absence of anything new then, here's something old-a curio from the archives of 1989, in which I briefly flirted with a kind of surreal cubism- Max Ernst style, making forms from string dipped in paint. Its called 'Woman attacked by moths' or something hopeless like that.
Quite rightly, I was leathered by the Bridewell studio crew for my callow affront- I was so crestfallen, but... I carried on regardless.
'I kept hearing David's plaintive cry, "I just wish something would break soon."' relates former manager, Kenneth Pitt in Marc Spitz's excellent new book- Bowie biography.
Reading those lines, its the Bowie I connect with the most. I think of him there, mired in pre-fame anonymity...'down on my knees in suburbia, down on myself in every way...' he would sing later on the 'Buddha of Suburbia' title song.
For nine years he schlepped himself around every dead beat, dead end repository, starving for his gravy, but still an indomitable talent never the less. Pre Ziggy, he couldn't even get arrested let alone a break. What spurred that self belief? Certainly he wasn't delusional, but in the face of such endless disappointment, I imagine he must have believed that he would die in the obscurity of his Beckenham roots-demons dance you to the precipice of defeat so many times as an artist.
There go I without the rest.
Robert Williams-the godfather of pop surrealism, makes some rather wonderful observations about the artists lot in this months anniversary edition of Juxtapoz too. A soundbyte every two sentences, I could pour over his eminently quotable delivery for hours, or at least every time I take my leave to the bog, which is where I do a lot of my ruminating in all honesty.
To paraphrase: 'In the last 30 years, the most gifted have had to make do with occupations as commercial artists. The fine art establishment has purged itself of beautifully executed imagery, and Art has become what Marcel Duchamp hoped for-whatever the artist points as Art.'
Though his consternation is largely pointed at the continuing adoption by the elite for abstraction, its a valid point that holds more than a cistern of water, particularly when you consider the most recent excreble contribution by post modernists figurehead, Damien Hirst, and the inevitable legion of platinum gold card collectors, that will be fawning over his shabby,Francis Bacon knock offs.
Capital "A" Art is a con, and I suspect the true artisans are those practitioners such as the Hirsts, Emmins, and that guy who glued elephant shit to a canvas whose name escapes me now. Those artists that parlay any true draftsmanship for the shock value of the emperors new clothes, and good for them-art history is littered with as many poseurs as it is Van Gogh's, auteur's rather than artists-why not give a kick to the establishment, take the money or even the Monet and run as it where. There is no honor in the artists garret, believe me.
For myself, I imagine that means I've taken the lesser road then, part of the marginalized that Williams advocates, but still no less hungry for that break as Bowie was in his suburban ennui.
Week two of 2012 and I'm battling my annual cold, between a commission which I cannot share and a self portrait (which I want not to just yet). I've also been trying to bring Rise to completion-Trying being the operative...a perfect case of disconnect between whats on the canvas and in the minds eye. 
