Motivation

can be very difficult sometimes! I'm still prevaricating over the project proposal for the second year - with the first session looming in a couple days... Nothing I seem to think of has sufficient resonance for me and this is coupled with a rather depressed state of mind regarding the value of just about all the activity I'm currently engaged in. Not a good combination.

I find myself looking at a lot of current landscape photography with a rather flat feeling of 'so what' - though its quite tough and costly I still have a feeling that simply going to a distant photogenic location (the Artic for example) with an 8x10 plate camera and taking an image really isn't either so difficult or onerous as it once might have been, nor is it in these technologically advanced times that sumptuous to look at. In short the absence of a transformative element to my mind straightforwardly doesn't elevate the activity to the status of art.

By the same token where a transformative act has been applied the results can seem very pretentious - and a good deal of recent art practice falls into that trap. Maybe there is somewhere in between that can create something with genuine meaning and resonance but I'm not seeing it! How (and whether) I can build this into a worthwhile proposal is yet to be seen. I seem to be staring at a blank wall rather like this one I photographed in Portugal a few years back...

Out and about - Competitions

I have been very hit and miss at entering competitions over the years - usually missing the deadlines despite best intentions. However as I now have less professional commitments elsewhere I'm making a better effort. First up this autumn is the Derby Open and this painting from last autumn - Secret Garden, Oil on Canvas 48x48 inches - made it into the show. I entered three works but given their size doubted they would all make the cut - and also given that they were very experimental, out of the 'normal' run of my work - more explicit imagery, more paint handling, I was interested to see whether they would be accepted at all. So to have ne on the walls is pleasing. I am still hesitent about entering any of the photographic work - 'straight' or manipulated but I maybe will put something of this kind forward to either Leicester or Nottingham (both coming up shortly).

Head above the Parapet

I raised the issue of a final exhibition of the MA cohort earlier in the year and set numerous hares running! You wouldn't believe the acrimony than results from an innocent enquiry. I imagine that the exhibition issue is more important to those who have never done it before than those of us who have been involved in (as well as wholly responsible for) shows since the mid 1960's! Nonethless as 'responsible' adults we ought to be able to sort out one small modest MA event easily enough. So risking the wrath of all I have put my head above the parapet once more with a draft proposal that if accepted has the benefit of both securing a decent venue at a time of our choosing and allowing a decent interval for securing the necessary funds to put the thing on with a degree (excuse the pun) of professionalism. I guess we'll see - last time the mere mention of the idea caused an avalanche of email traffic...

Over the summer there was so much of interest going on this blog couldn't possibly keep up with it. One thing that sticks in my mind was the Derby Feste - a three day extravaganza of entertainment. On the Saturday a French performance group entranced everyone with their drumming and their elevation into the air above the Market Square - the photos here hardly does it justice (it really was a case of 'you had to be there') - raised up like a Calder mobile over the top of the Clock Tower, the QUAD and the Assembly Rooms. Magnifique!

Coming Up For Air!

What with one thing and another (a trip to Venice, Sarah's stint on 'the fourth plinth' and my coffee morning in case of Macmillan Cancer Support) it's been a fair while since I last posted anything here. I do wonder what the purpose is...after all at best a handful of people view it...all of whom I could easily have a decent conversation with! Nonetheless I shall try and rachet up the postings as I move into the second year of the MA. We have been given our initial materials for the upcoming semester that include the pro forma of the 'learning contract' which we should have completed in draft form by Wednesday week (our first session of AY 09/10). A daunting prospect - even for someone like myself who started drafting these things around 15 years ago when a colleague and myself established an MA by project and felt we ought to have a means of benchmarking the student's progress over a major project against some sensibly articulated document setting out what they intended to do.

Of course now the boot is on the other foot and I am the student I'm bristling at the impudence of lecturers trying to tie down my unfettered creativity in advance of making the work! Still it's a good discipline to have and exactly why I signed up to the programme - though I am determined to keep the document hazy and provisional for as long as I can get away with it!

Over the past few weeks I have been mulling over the final project and now I have to write up a draft it seems so...banal...methinks. But whenever I try to think of something more exciting, dynamic or - goodness - original I simply blank out.

Anyway more of that later - for now here's an image of my 'Andy Warhol says give peace a chance' - made in 1972 to accompany a 'sound piece' and performance - and resurrected for my Macmillan Coffee Morning event!

Ostrale 09

Have had some time to reflect on participation in the 'Ostrale 09' in Dresden and also on some of the other work featured in the show. For example the photography (of which there was a fair bit) was a mixture of what might be expected in a German dominated exhibition and work that very definitely isn't at all related to the 'Dusseldorf' school. I am posting a few examples but as I can never work out how they get ordered on the blog you may have to work out what's what for yourself!

I guess Goran Gnaudschun's portraits might have been what was expected - their frontality, naturalism and formality is evident but they also had a wistfulness to them. Ingo Wilhelm's black and white portraits shot from outside the windows of public transport were especially moving. Sven Alexander Heine had experimented with photo emulsion on concrete but I felt the images themselves were insufficiently strong to carry the metaphorical weight of the form. I very much liked Astrid Korntheuer's inkjet prints of forest and fields - but then it's not surprising as they were in territory similar to that I want to work!

Back to some kind of normality...

It's been a hectic few weeks that culminated in my wife's exhibition opening at the City Gallery in Leicester earlier in the week. I'm now off to my studio on what is pretty much the first quiet, uninterrupted day for nearly a month! I have quite a lot of catching up to do on a number of fronts...the painting activity is underway and quite a few canvasses require resolution before I start in seriously on some new work loosely based around an imagined garden that will be mainly conducted on a large scale. On the photography front I want to experiment further with the ideas I am kicking around for my major project for the second year of the Masters and that will mean more visits to site and more research of a detailed kind into the relevant flora in the area under consideration. I'm planning to merge several images into one another, with the scale of the various natural matter oscillating wildly on the picture surface and then print them a larger scale. A first effort - purely for initial interest - is posted here.

Back Home

from travels across Germany - its a big country when you travel from the western border with Luxembourg to the eastern boarder with the Czech republic! Still we visited both Weimar and Dresden that (apart from Berlin) are my first forays into the old east. Both of them in their own way very beautiful cities. The show in Dresden was fascinating - a mix of ultra professional and student shindig - and all taking place in the old slaughterhouse buildings (as immortalised by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse 5). My work got a small room in the Direktoren Villa to itself and I was pleased with it! See the photo...the rooms had been left pretty much as they were creating an interesting tension between the marks on the canvas, deliberated but seemingly random and those on the 'distressed' walls, random but now seemingly deliberate! I'd taken a last minute decision (chicken maybe?) to show paintings rather than photos and/or manipulated digital works but in the context (of over 130 artists exhibiting) where there was a predominance of such work I was glad I had. In fact I am increasingly worried that the photography 'experiment' is proving to be a bridge too far for me in terms of my passion for the handmade. But maybe I can (as my friend Simon hinted at recently) bring the two closer together over the coming months?