Thursday, June 24, 2010

Hmm, June already. I'm really not a very good blogger, am I? Since my last entry, I have, er, split up with my girlfriend, moved out of my flat and into a room down the road and generally been going through a kind of existential crisis. I have offset this by doing lots of evening classes: French, poetry, and an art class called "creative colour for artists and designers". I'm scared to say it, but I think I might finally be getting it as far as the art thing goes. Not that I'm necessarily any better at doing it, but at least I think I understand a lot more about what goes into a work of art. At last week's class, for example, we were supposed to draw flowers using a stick with some ink on it, and then colour them in using inks. Fine. I had no problem with the drawing bit, since I have done rather a lot of that in the past. But as soon as I started applying colour, I found myself adrift in a sea of infinite possibility with no idea what I was doing. What was I doing? IN ANY CASE I NEVER WANTED TO BE AN ARTIST! I only started drawing because I couldn't get anyone to accept my story submissions... But you start drawing, and before you know it, you get sucked in by the whole "art" thing, and you want to get better at it for its own sake. So the long and the short of it is that I got myself to this position where I could draw reasonably competently, or some things anyway, but then having this massive dilemma about whether to branch out and use pencils, pens, charcoal, etc. and whether to go abstract or just draw things... the whole art thing seemed so stressful. Don't draw much nowadays, as Philip Larkin might have written. So, back to the start of this twaddle, I think I understand the difference between art and...well, something else. Artists don't really know what the end product will be. They are interested in process. i.e, they go, "today I will use blue and yellow to express emotion and all other colours can go and fuck themselves" and that is a sort of experiment, and what comes out the other end might be good or it might be bad. It will probably be good if you are Picasso, because your talent and training means that whatever you do will be skilled, but if you are a typical art school undergrad it will probably be pretentious and awful, because you haven't made enough mistakes yet. All this is blatantly obvious to most people who have had some experience, but god it's taken me years to understand that skill in execution isn't everything, that having an intention or idea and seeing where that takes you is far more likely to produce art than planning it in advance. Tant pis.