Quite Ready for Another Adventure

Current top of studio/plan chest/kithcen table/laundry detergent storage area/filing system

In 2017 I gave up my studio at Making Space, an arts community centre in Leigh Park, Havant. It was a very nice studio. Four white walls, nice light and a heater. Luxury actually, especially the heater part. So why give it up? Well there is a very exciting future studio ahead of me, and well, we could not afford the rent. The later made a huge number of anxieties rise up...am I good enough? Why am I not making enough to pay the rent? Why am I not selling work? Have I failed? To be honest, for any who suffer with severe anxiety, these questions are the same repeated again and again, just wearing different disguises and using different situations as an excuse for them to take over. Of course I had not failed. I do not ever believe art can be measured by finance (see blog post 1). Well, I am not selling work because I do not put it on the market to sell. Simple really. So of course I am not making enough to pay the rent, but that was my decision so I have to live by it.

And so the whole contents of the studio now live in our kitchen (including the presses) until the new space is ready, which is very exciting. Beyond the initial anxiety, the last year and a half has made me actually assess what it is I am doing as an artist, and what is it I which to communicate, and truly why are there so may 'I's in anything to do with artist? The later is hugely important because the last year and a half has opened me up to many aspect of arts practice that I actually really enjoy, that deeply challenge me, and that beyond everything, share to others the power of the visual arts. Having your own practice moved from 4m x 4m to approximately 0.6m x 1m (and shared with a budding 5 year old printmaker) makes you act upon impulse, realise it is still a lot of space, don't dilly dally in artistic pensiveness and to reach out there to find a challenge that shakes your bones.

Pinned up (or perhaps nailed is the more accurate description) to our kitchen wall next to the tea is the Bread and Puppet Theatre company Cheap Art Manifesto from 1984. I read it everyday. Not to idolise it, not to have it as sacred text, but just to smile and to think, that's awesome. Because it sums up far better then all the words in this blog what Art to me, and I hope many others, actually means. What is really means. And so I may not have sat in the corner of the kitchen and whittled away at woodcuts to the early morning every night until I have artistic cramp, but hey, if your up with two children at 5am everyday, that is kind of forgiven I feel. And even better, if those two children get to produce lino-cuts like the one below by G, then cool. I give up now lol. I have a huge excitement about working with the community, about arts education and about the possibilities of combining this with personal practice, so that, well it is no longer personal and the 'I' disappears. Because no one really owns art, not really. I doesn't really come into it does it?

G's lino cut of the Animal Factory where they rescue animals to make them better. With moon and morning star.