Creative – Page 5 – The Consulting Artist

Practicing : Part One

Is the work ever done?

A friend of mine got in touch last week to let me know they love my Twitter bio. Currently it reads…

Artist and consultant. Embracing uncertainty, sketching myself into existence. Helping people do things differently, through an artistic lens.

I thanked my friend, and noted it’s taken me ten years to write those two short sentences (good work reveals itself slowly). I can’t remember exactly what previous iterations of my Twitter bio look like, and I do know there have been several. Things change.

For a few years I wrote my bio as a credo, ‘a statement of beliefs which guide someone’s actions’. I forget the exact details of it now, but it included things like: productive beats busy, we are all artists, and something about conversations… Trust me it made more sense at the time, and when it came to the attention of a certain researcher whose work I admire, I readily admit I was pleased.

I became very attached to the credo, sticking with it for a long time, changing very little, if anything about it. Yet all the time, my work shifted and moved, because I kept practicing.

Part of the challenge that comes with labels, is knowing when to use them and when to change them. In the last couple of years I’d become stuck in lots of ways, before coming to a decision to be more intentional about letting my consulting and artistic practices overlap and inform one another. In truth that’s been happening for a while, but I’d felt reluctant to to acknowledge this publicly. Last year, Richard Martin suggested I bring my art and my consulting web sites together, which I did. Combining these two things felt odd for a while, as I suppose does anything new, yet I resisted the temptation to unwind and separate things again, and now, it just feels right. For the time being, my Twitter bio is spot on.

Meg, thank you for your note last week. I am pleased you noticed, and I wonder how long it’ll be before another change…Is the work ever done?

Part Two of ‘Practicing’ will be about how a small experiment in January 2018 is growing into one of my most important bodies of work.

Moving

A story about trying something new, getting stuck, and moving on again.

“Nothing happens until something moves” Albert Einstein.

In April 2018 I made my first tentative steps into stencil cutting and spray painting. I used Record Store Day as the spark to cut and spray some simple lettering designs onto old LP records. The response to these initial pieces was positive, so I kept making, and the vinyl junkie project was born.

Record Store Day 2018. The Happy Talk art is sprayed on to a copy of South Pacific.

I began to develop my own lettering styles and experiment with different paint effects, and then I received my first vinyl junkie commission. I was learning lots about how painful on the fingers stencil cutting is, and how fiddly spray paint can sometimes be. I was enjoying the project, things were going well.

A couple of months later, while showing my work at the 2018 Carshalton Artists Open Studios, I received some unsolicited feedback on the vinyl junkie project. ‘It’s a bit A-level, a bit student. These aren’t very good, I think you should stop doing them’.

One of the things I experienced when I was at my lowest with stress and burnout, was a tendency to focus on the negative, and I took this feedback to heart. The open studios event was a success, but in the aftermath, I put the vinyl to one side, and stopped making. Every day I walked past a small stack of vinyl leaning in the studio doorway, and every day I did nothing about it. The vinyl shifted from something I really enjoyed using, to becoming an obstacle around which I skirted every time I passed through the doorway.

This went on for a while, until one day I accidentally kicked the pile, and some of the vinyl scattered on the floor. I restacked the pieces and carried on. Two days later, during my weekly counselling, I talked about this story, and concluded it was time to either restart the vinyl junkie project, or put it away and move on.

“Nothing happens until something moves” Albert Einstein

I decided to go again, and almost immediately after making the decision, a commission enquiry arrived, and that enquiry turned into this.

I was asked by some good friends to make something with a nod to the city of Cleveland where they live. I experimented with a few stencil cuts before settling on the one you see here, laid onto a starry night sky background. The piece on the right was a surprise thank you for my friends, incorporating letters of their names into a heart shape. Shortly after making these, I was approached by someone wanting a black cat vinyl. This black cat commission marked my first move into multi layered stencil cutting, and I am continuing to develop my practice with more layers, and different paint effects.

I’ve learned a few things from this experience:

Whilst I can’t stop unsolicited feedback – I don’t have to pay it any attention.
When giving feedback, I should ask if it is wanted first.
Getting stuck isn’t great, but it happens. When it does, remember that nothing happens until something moves.
Show your work.
Keep experimenting.

What’s next for the vinyl junkie project? I don’t know, and I am open to commission enquiries so if you have any ideas, drop me a line and let’s talk.

A Gift Inside A Gift

I recently agreed to donate a piece of art to a fundraising event for Wallington Animal Rescue (WAR), an excellent local good cause, run tirelessly by Neil and Amanda. As the event drew nearer, I got more nervous. A painting of a cat had been requested, a subject I’ve only tackled once before now, and on that occasion I took a rather unconventional approach.

I didn’t want to repeat the previous cat portrait, I needed to find something different. A few days ago, after a few failed attempts at cat painting using ink on paper, with uncertainty levels rising I found myself turning a small box over and over in my hands. The box was a gift from Simon Heath, containing some sketching charcoals. Simon gave me this gift several years ago, it’s a lovely little box with a sliding lid, containing six different coloured sticks. Over the years I have opened and closed the box many times, reluctant to disturb its miniature perfection by using it. On this occasion I broke the spell, took the sticks from the box and began to work. A vaguely cat-like shape began to emerge, and I pressed on. I ended up with a rather relaxed looking feline, and decided to title the art work, ‘Peace’. Uncertainty overcome, the good people at WAR appreciated the donation and Peace now has a new home.

‘Peace’ in the studio, accompanied by the now used sketching sticks.

I told Simon I had finally got round to using his gift, and he kindly replied with a lovely short story, which I’d like to share with you here.

“My favourite teacher at school was, perhaps unsurprisingly, my art teacher. He was not your conventional idea of an art teacher. He had served in the merchant navy during the Second World War. He was torpedoed and his ship sunk during the Malta convoys.

He was an evocative storyteller. He did not spare us the hardships and horrors of his service. He had a wealth of tales of all kinds and liked to set us drawing and painting projects provoked by different types of music. He used to jokingly threaten us with “The Persuader”. A table leg studded with nails and drawing pins akin to Captain Caveman’s club. He had a favourite scary story called Skull Island. It was terrifying and accompanied by grotesque sound effects.

He brought in plaster replicas of works of the great classical sculptors like Michelangelo. He liked to think that the figure already existed within the marble. The sculptor’s art was releasing that figure. I’ve always cherished that idea. And so, thank you for patiently reading this story and understanding why I love the idea that your cat was sleeping within the charcoal this whole time. And you’ve now released it into a wider consciousness. My teacher’s name was Peter Clay. He died some years ago but his stories didn’t. He was brilliant.”

I love the idea that sometimes our work is already there, it just needs releasing. That’s a notion I shall seek out again, next time a goal is proving elusive.

I hope you enjoyed this piece of writing as much as I enjoyed handing the finished artwork over, and seeing Simon’s story. If the idea of working with uncertainty interests you, come to the next Working With Uncertainty workshop in London on October 16th, and explore new ways to do things differently, in a safe, encouraging environment. See you there.