Begin Again

So, I need to get better at making entries to this journal. At the end of today’s group meeting, we did 5 minutes of continuous writing, and I am using what I wrote there as the basis for this entry. I think that the problem that I have created with this journal is that I have treated it as a piece of admin and as such I have underestimated its usefulness both as a record of what I have been doing and as a way of thinking through why I have been doing it. My intention is to go back through the last few months and get some of the detail down, but this will be unfortunately, less useful than if I had done it contemporaneously.

What I do not want to do is just flatten things by over-recording what I do. As an undergrad I was hyper-diligent in my record keeping and as GSA did not attach a word-count to the documentation of studio practice (more fool them), I submitted forensic amounts of detail and in that process rather removed the fun from what I was doing. It was also pointed out to me that this actually made it harder for some of the tutors to look at the final work without knowing almost ‘too much’ about it.

A lot of last term was taken up making work for the exhibition that is now on in Edinburgh. I need to document this and will make a post of images once that’s done. It was a relief to get it done and opened. The reception has been very positive, and it always feels good to get work out into the world. I genuinely enjoy hearing what people have to say about my work and have learned to not be precious. I was that interested to see whether the use of AI in the process might be viewed negatively but this has not been the case so far. The conversations that I have had have actually revealed how little a lot of people know about the things that we are currently calling AI. Most people seem to over-estimate what they can do (one person did think that the paintings had been physically made by an AI!) which I guess is largely a result of the wild hype that the tech companies are currently engaged in.

As I move on from the exhibition work, I have a decision to make. If I were to follow my usual pattern, I would now start doing something quite different. This is where a term of reflective practice has been useful. I think that I now actually believe that I don’t have to do that. I could just carry on painting. In last week’s group session, there was a discussion about exploring and I was quite taken with some points that were made about the idea that you can explore within a narrower area. There was some talk around mastery of medium and whilst I do not aspire to this particularly, I do think that I would benefit from some continuity in my practice. I think that sometimes my reactive jumping between mediums results in my not sticking with a question and developing the complexity of my response.

This is a slightly long-winded way of saying that I am going to stick with painting for at least some of the time that is available to me. It will be interesting to see where the paintings go without the context of an exhibition deadline. I like deadlines but I need to start treating them as waypoints in my practice rather than destinations.

All that said I do not think that I will be showing paintings in the interim show. I am still keen to experiment with animation but having seen the exhibition space in today’s meeting I am not sure that that is the right answer for this show. I will give this some thought.