Connections
A Table Cloth.
We artists respond to the environment we live in. That’s what Art’s about really, isn’t it? But part of that environment is one’s own artistic past. And of course, the older you get the more of that there is. And it all feeds into what you’re doing now.
I’ve become increasingly conscious of this in recent years.
The basic format of many of the portraits I’ve done post teaching, for example, hark back to the cutout figures I first created whilst at teacher training college in the late sixties and then explored on a smaller scale later.
This is also true of the doodles I’ve been spasmodically churning out during the past few years in place of more serious artistic endeavours. The content of several of these have their beginnings in an even earlier series of drawings – preparatory work for sculpture. The inspiration for these older drawings comes from the rubber factory I was working in at the time – there were pipes everywhere in that place. The sculptures were never made but the fascination with the subject matter keeps on finding its way into present day sketchbooks.
I could come up with many more examples – the connections are numerous and intricately intertwined – but it needs to be stressed that they aren’t consciously created. The making of Art being an intuitive activity it’s often only afterwards, and sometimes a long time afterwards, that you start noticing them.
In fact it was only when I started writing the history of my artistic activity and digging through old photographs that I became aware of many of these connections and the extent that they permeated what I now do.
And then I visited an exhibition of recent work by Jasper Johns. He has been revisiting the ideas he explored in his early years. This wasn’t just accepting connections with past works; he was actively and consciously revisiting them. I was much taken with this idea, particularly the way he was doing it; I was liberated and a little inspired by it.
All of which is merely a preamble to explaining the strange little sculpture I’ve been attempting to make recently. The source is an art college failure.
It’s tempting to think I got nothing from art college but over the years I’ve been forced to recognise that a lot more stuck than I’d realised. Like school French which you feel went through your brain like water through a colander until you find yourself in France and odd words and phrases suddenly present themselves.
But one thing’s for sure: I was a dramatic failure when it came to what I produced. I was a lost soul – confused, bewildered and so bereft of confidence that I was barely able to function at all. I learned in the years that followed college that making art successfully (for me at least) involved a relatively simple series of steps . Just in case you’re wondering these are:
1. Having something catch my attention by simply looking at the world.
2. Wonder what it was about the phenomenon that is so attractive or attracting.
3. Explore it through drawing, making and thinking – often a great deal of first and third particularly.
4. Make choices throughout this process consisting of ‘like’ and ‘don’t like’.
5. Arrive at a Eureka! moment when some defining essence emerges – in the form of an actual artwork.
(One of my artist friends said: “I don’t work like that.” My answer is that he probably does but stages 2 – 5 are all combined and interwoven in the painting process. For him he ‘just paints’ I work like that myself sometimes)
At art college I never really got past stage one. With the consequence that I often started making stuff without knowing where it was going. Yet when I look back at photographs of the work of this period, rediscovered relatively recently, I realise that there often was an embryo of something during that period, the potential for viable and meaningful works of art; ideas worth exploring at least. The problem was I had neither the strategy, nor, more importantly, the confidence to do it.
One such was this odd assemblage. In fact it’s slightly embarrassing to look at now. It needs context to make any a sense at all – a Sculpture Department awash with brand new modern materials in which tutors and students alike were doing exotic things – one student casting the front of a lorry, a tutor making a fruit and veg stall out of fibreglass. But even in that context, my little tableaux was an idea sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac of incomprehension. Having said that, there is a little more about it than meets the eye. For, although the eggs and table are real the cloth was dipped in resin. It was stiff. Did I take it off the table and experiment? I can’t remember. If I did, it didn’t go anywhere.
Fast forward now to a few weeks ago when I acquired some epoxy resin for another project. Using the stuff I recalled this piece from my art college days, dipped a handkerchief sized bit of cloth in some, hung it over a block of wood and produced this.
And so it was that, fifty-five years after reaching stage 1 (see list above) I was about to embark on stage 2. The question was: could the older, confident me, make something meaningful with what the the twenty year old student, wracked with uncertainty and self doubt, had started.
As you can see, by the time this photo was taken I’d already made a start. I painted the fibreglass form white (on the outside at least) and found a way, using a piece of wire coat hanger and a couple of blocks of wood, to suspend it in space.
And, over the next week or two (or three), on and off, I moved on to stage four. The drawing bit was, needless to say done on my iPad.
But, apart from a bit of tinkering most of it took place in my head. Of course the trouble with my particular head is that, as I explained at the beginning, it’s a bit crowded – full of the stuff that I’ve been pouring into it and having it chew on for the past sixty years. If it’s one thing I’m not short of it’s ideas – they come along like London buses, but with the important difference that I don’t have to wait for the first one to arrive. One of the consequences of this seems to be that I get fewer of those Eureka! moments than I used to. Of course an alternative explanation for that is that I’ve lost the ability to focus in – all these so called ideas are just random artistic noise. But more likely, if I’m honest, I just can’t be bothered – I’m not driven like I used to be.
And then the lockdown came. I finished the WWI soldier painting and moved on the the tablecloth.
And this is where it ended up.
I decided that, by this time it, had become about space – another throwback, to the constructions I made way back when, the brush I had with minimalism in the late sixties whilst, unknown to me in my little terraced house in Chorley, Donald Judd and friends were turning it into a movement on the other side of the Atlantic.
But, by the time I’d set it up and taken the photographs and the odd video the doubts had set in. Then again, now I check out the video I do think it sort of works.
If I were thirty odd still I’d make a dozen or more, ringing the changes. But I’m not, I’m seventy-five, so the possibilities that exist in my head will just have to stay there for now. The thing itself, isolated again, goes back to live on my arty shelf in the lean-to cum studio where it can interact with the other things that live there ( And from which I derive much pleasure).
In the meantime I’ll allow myself the odd dream. How about the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for example?
