I suppose you could say that I’m an ‘amateur’ artist, that art is my ‘hobby’. In fact no, I take that back. I’m no amateur hobbyist dabbler. I’m an artist. I’m a bloody artist.
If you take something seriously, the hobby label grates. And I take art seriously. I might not be on track to making it in the art world (but who knows?), but I have gradually decided that it is a key part of my creative life, subtly joined to the other stuff.
Six years ago I went back to college, part-time, for a year, to study fine art
I am having this moment of soul-searching because I’m moving out of a studio space I’ve been using for a few years. But I didn’t use it all that much, to be honest: inspiration waxed and waned. As I sweep up the debris of various aborted projects, I wonder if that was my chance to make a go of it, to switch career path with glamorous gusto, and I blew it.
I painted a bit at school. It’s a special sort of sensual pleasure, getting in the zone of making something. You use your mind differently, in a way that involves the physical world, unlike the creepy virtual reality of reading and writing. You get stuck in and forget to break for lunch and feel entirely alive. But I only kept it up a bit as a student. In fact I was drawn to it in depressive phases; it sometimes felt like an act of defiance. Life is impossible but I can do this little concrete thing, and find grounds for affirmation here, amid the gloom. Making a picture was a way of saying, ‘look’. Look how colourful those autumn trees are. This felt like positive participation in the world.
Towards the end of my postgraduate study, art suddenly became more important. Sick of libraries and footnotes, I felt a hunger to be involved in physical making. This was related to my interest in religion, my involvement in religion. I felt the need to be involved in cultural creation – art felt joined to religious expression, ritual. My art often has a religious theme, but it’s always sort-of religious, because for me making something is linked to a sense of excited wonder at the world, and so the resulting physical thing has a whiff of ritual object – even if it’s an experiment that I throw away after a while. I’m only half-claiming to produce holy objects.
One has to learn not to care whether one’s creative efforts count as ‘art’, and just do it. Fine if you’re an ebullient punkish personality – otherwise you have to cultivate that attitude. I was helped by Chesterton’s witty mantra: ‘If something is worth doing then it’s worth doing badly’. One’s efforts are worthwhile irrespective of what people think. They are worthwhile because they have an aura of creativity, of joy I guess.
One has to embrace the foolishness of it. And boy is there a lot of foolishness involved. But one has been given permission by the geniuses of modernism. Thank God for those crazy dudes who dared to make childlike art and call it the cutting-edge thing. Thank God that they freed us up to enjoy being weird and silly, and technically flawed. But although wacky modern art is culturally respected, there is still difficulty involved in trying to be part of it. It often feels like a sort of madness – spending hours, days, weeks, on a project that doesn’t work out. And one of my interests is performance art, where the overlap with madness is plain. It’s not a cute little bourgeois hobby.
Six years ago I went back to college, part-time, for a year, to study fine art. I’m not sure what to say about it. On one hand it feels like a dubious racket, that art colleges encourage oddball dabblers to think of themselves as embryonic artists. Weren’t we being encouraged in a delusion? But in fact it gave me confidence: this formal acknowledgement that I was focusing on art enabled me to come out, up to a point, as an ‘artist’.
I showed some work in a couple of group exhibitions, but it didn’t lead to anything. You have to jump in with both feet to have a chance of getting somewhere, and you also need the right connections and the right media profile. I’ve been a bit cautious, circumspect. I’m aware that most of my ideas are pretty hare-brained, so I’m wary of giving myself free rein.
My aim is not to be a successful artist (though I’m open to it), but to carry on making art. For some, this could be a purely private thing, but I feel the need to connect with the world in some way. I’ve done some projects for churches and schools, and I’m forever planning amazing public-art events. There’s a sense of eternal pregnancy. It’s frustrating, but it seems part of the deal.
Sometimes I’m busy with some strange little task, like screwing one piece of junk to another, and wonder what this or that acquaintance who has a very proper job would think if they could see how I’m spending my day.
My wife deserves a mention. She largely tolerates the display of strange experimental artworks in the house, and garden. She sometimes admits to liking them. Then she compensates by decreeing the removal of another work to the studio or to my mother’s spare bedroom. My mother also deserves a nod of thanks. It’s probably all her fault, for praising my early work.
I will find another studio in due course, I will tinker with interestingly-shaped junk from the street, and savour that whiff of ritual possibility, and I’ll keep dreaming of the big public art-works too. Try and stop me.
