A Busy Year

Time flies, so they say, when your having fun.  Another year has passed and I have been busy both in my personal and professional life, the household has increased by one, the family has increased by one, the cat has increased in size and the sculptures have grown.

In addition to all of this I have taken over the role of 'arts facilitator' for The Josefina de Vasconcellos Arts Care Trust, a charity that strives to bring art as a means of change to the lives of individuals seeking change.  Since taking on the role there have been exhibitions by 1 emerging artist and 4 others each on a monthly turnaround, the Josefina Gallery is now booked up until February with only three more to go before the end of the year group show

There are for sure a lot of happy faces as a result notwithstanding a great collection of work and effort from all those artist contributing.
this has all been a huge learning curve for me, the arrangement the organising and the PR side have been on a much grander scale than I have managed before, I am always easier able to promote others than myself and this has been apparent in my output.
From the perspective of my own work it has been a balancing act between interests and necessities outside of work and the responsibility to my own practice, slow but sure wins the race but.... even if sculpture work does take a little longer I should have hoped to have completed a little more than I have.
In saying that, where I have lacked in quantity I have more than made up in quality, bringing all of the lessons over the past two years together I have the foundations now to continue with 5 large pieces over the coming 12 Months.

 With 2015 a matter of weeks away I have a trip to Bristol to visit my sister, estranged for 40 years, this is my second trip and one that I am looking forward to as much as the first, the biggest surprise for me however was the changes in the landscape.
The last time I travelled the West Coast Line via Birmingham and Wolverhampton it was a very different journey, there were no burned and bombed out buildings on this trip and the cities were a far cry from my memory, as was Bristol, the changes were just too great for me to even quantify in words I was, in essence, in a city that was as different as if I had never been there before, how things change when you take a few decades out of your life!!!

searching for the unknown

It is of the utmost difficulty, if not an impossibility, to find something when you dont know what it is you are looking for, at one would think so however it is not so impossible to find.
My last BLOG post was in 0ctober 2012 and in retrospect it is not so far away yet so much has occurred during that time that full disclosure would leave me with no other option than to publish my entire journal entries for the past 15 months, an awesome task which I am not even willing to consider so I shall just leave you, the reader, to trawl my facebook Timeline or page (dont forget to like the page when you visit to get regular updates ) should you have any desire to know, as for anyone ofcourse there is much that has happened that is not for the public domain unless you are so world reknowned that your entire life is open to public opinion, fortunately I am far from that so you will have to suffice with that which I have published.
That is not particularly because of secrets, embarrassment or any other negative issue in my life simply because the mundane day to day stuff that happens around our lives is the same for everyone as each of us battles our way through lifes journey, however, back to the good stuff, the search for the unknown.

So says Jimmy Buffett ( American singer–songwriter, author, actor, and businessman)  ''Searching is half the fun:  life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party''.

In August 2012 the end of my my random search ceased  as far as work as I had come to know it was concerned, it was time to stop chasing the unknown though this only came about as I watched someone launch herself into such creative spirit as to turn her life upside down, she had no teaching, no knowledge, no understanding yet instinctively she laid down paint in a way that I had struggled to understand for most of the past 15 years, whereas I would struggle for hours upon hours and achieve little more than a token gesture she would just walk up to a large canvas, lose herself for half an hour then walk away from a masterpiece, this was my signal to stop, I could not achieve that which I found most beautiful in art, the spontaneous abandonment to innermost feelings, regardless of the properties of paint, uncaring that dust and dirt would fall into the tin of paint or on to the canvas, ignorance that one line or block of colour was just the right shape, tone and colour, hell, complete ignorance toward which would be the next colour to stick her brush into, I did not have that in me, restricted by convention, filled with the rights and wrongs of creativity, moulded by institutionalised order, completely tied up and unable to get free, it was time to change; paints were given away, canvases, preparations sticks brushes and anything to do with paint slowly dissappeared toward more capable hands, hands that did not care whether a tub of paint cost 5p or £30 it was all treated the same.

This left me with nothing for a very long time, aside paint I had not considered any other art form as a serious contender for my time, other than watching and helping when asked of by this new and exciting painter, my life was aimless for a very long period of time yet my mind remained active and creative constantly looking around rather than searching, I watched this painter develop in her own time at her own speed, reckless by all account, yet there was something there that I was lacking and took some time to discover; over the course of the next year I watched as paintings piled up 10, 50, 100, 200, 600 prolific is not a word that describes her output adequately, each one totally different from the previous but from number 1 to number 800 every one had the same energy, passion, urgency, and style, it was a lightbulb moment as I realised that my entire problem was not the lack of ability to create but moreso the range of choices that I was battling with, every style of paintwork I had endeavoured to master, from cave painting to impressionism, pointilism to cubism, from Picasso to Gaugan, Rembrandt from Turner to Goya, Mondrian, Scully, Rothko, Pollock and a host of others, there and back again several times over and over again for years, all without any personal satisfaction, only frustrations, ''The definition of insanity, quotes from Einstein, is doing the same task over and over again and expecting a different result'', I love aphorisms, is that what I was doing, was I insane?

''Do what you can with what you have where you are'', another aphorism rang in my head, Theodore Roosevelt, after giving everything away I had little left in the studio, even after investing elsewhere there was little cash to start again, all I had was a roll of chicken wire, from and for what I had not a clue but, there it was, papers, papers and, more papers, chicken wire, paper mache, I remembered enjoying brief forays there when 3D popped in and out of my life, I had nothing to lose and nothing to use.

That is where I am at the moment, wire mesh bricks after wire mesh brick, shape after shape, moulding, bending twisting pulling and pushing, covering but, most of all enjoying every moment with continuity and direction with Peace and time filled positively.