I knew I wanted to express my feelings about that involuntary curse called ‘creativity’. I say that, because I wonder if life wouldn’t have been easier if I had studied to be a stockbroker or something like that, rather than enjoy a life enhancing and fulfilling training in Fine Art.
Damn creativity! Unless you can sell the result of working, it gets in the way of making a living. However generous or meagre one’s artistic talent may be, there is something obsessing, ineluctable about one’s calling to be involved with the arts and attempts to express original thought.
When restarting a life involved with the visual arts in 1993, I spoke of having identified five requirements to be a practising artist. They are, in no particular order, (i) The wish to do so, (ii) the time to do it, (iii) a place to do it (no matter where), (iv) some materials with which to work (no matter what) and, (v) most importantly, Something to say! Realising this last requirement came as something of bombshell to me; it took a lot of understanding!
However, during the following 21 years, I think I found something.
The years 2014 - 2016 proved to be fallow period in my creative life, but in 2017, I chose to embark upon a piece containing several references to some of the earlier elements of my artistic practice.
When I thought it finished, I entitled it,‘Five Pillars of Creativity’.
I started to live with what I had just created, but after a while, I must admit to being somewhat bemused and disappointed by the result: A mad concoction of disparate elements, a visual potpourri. Was it really an expression of what I had in mind in the first place? All I know is that, having started with some spray paint overspill on an old bed sheet, I set to, using collage materials, various other paints, reclaimed wood and the best of intentions. Nonetheless, I felt it was a mess.
However, there was something there and I decided to continue working on it. The irregularly shaped frame was too constraining, the bright colour values too disparate, the list of Latin and English words were hermetically sealed; their fluid nature not having its own agency to express - and the central, vulva like element just too vulgar; all in all, not a well executed piece of work. I dismantled the construction and set to - changing or modifying each element, creating a more integrated colour pallet and framing it within a stretched canvas, outer display panel. I had come a long way from the starting point to discover a context, identifying things in a time and space, of which we are not.
On a more mundane note, this image is taken with full, frontal lighting with the glass panel removed.
