Some thoughts

January (and therefore the exhibition) suddenly feels very close. I have been doing a lot of extra teaching this term. I am grateful for the money as I have tuition fees to pay but am also conscious that it is eating into the time that I had allocated to making the exhibition work. I worked through the weekend and that has steadied the ship a little, but I think that I am probably going to need to work all the weekends between now and Christmas. I don’t mind this as I often enjoy the ‘making’ part of the process. I am just a bit disappointed that I find myself once again in the position of making work that will have to go straight on the wall without a period of reflection/ evaluation. I guess a lot of people work like that (I have certainly had a lot of wet paintings to deal with when I have organised group shows) but I was aiming to do better this time.

On the plus side I did show one of the finished paintings in the impromptu crit that we did last week and the feedback was encouraging. For a while now I have felt uncertain about how I want to paint. I have oscillated between the descriptive and the abstract and whilst everything tends to be reasonably accomplished, or at least competent, it has never quite felt like it’s ‘enough’. I used to sometimes struggle to understand what the tutors at GSA were telling me about my work and I think now, with some reflection, that this was the point that the were making; what you are doing is fine, good even, but you could do more; be more experimental and less safe. These paintings currently feel like they might have moved this on a bit. I am never very good at judging work when it’s new, so I guess I won’t really know for a while.

Pondering this has also reactivated another unresolved bit of thinking. One of the things that I often felt like I was taking heat for when I was an undergrad was the level of competency/ quality of finish displayed in my work. It was (reasonably frequently) raised as a sort of criticism but it was hard to pin down what was meant and I found it difficult to get people to help me drill down what the problem was. I am a very neat and tidy worker and sometimes even the roughest experiments can look quite considered and I wondered if that was the problem. Do I have to comply with a visual language that indicates that ‘this work is rough and ready’? Is there a required level of obvious provisionality that has to be achieved to signal ‘experimentation’? It sometimes felt like there was a code to which I was not privy, and I watched people do the same thing over and over for three years and be lauded as experimental and open-minded, whilst I ricocheted between painting, printmaking, photography, film making, model building, and collage and yet seemed to be coloured ‘cautious’. Perhaps it was just their way of pushing me or perhaps they were on to something. Making work in the current context means that I probably need to think more on this. There is something to locate and unpack here.