It can be very hard to manage the whole process of being an artist. To navigate your way towards success, to enable you the self-sufficiency to continue your artistic passion. Firstly there is ordinary life to contend with: family, bills, food shopping, illness, laundry, tidy up and repeat. Then there is finding a space to work, buying materials and making canvasses followed by varnishing and framing/presentation. These two things are hurdles that on there own could stop you in your tracks. Ideas and actually painting can be the least of an artists challenges. I never thought I would say that.
The next hill to climb is towards exposure, powered by dreams, determination and social media to reach the pot of gold: A sale! There is already a bottleneck of talented artists seeking to exhibit in white-box style galleries, with as much as 50% commission lining the galleries pockets. Further, the artist needs to fund and arrange the safe transportation of their work to and from the location plus insurance costs.
Last night I had a crazy dream of a gallery in my garden. A garden gallery for one day only. Maybe this
is not such a mad idea, weather permitting. It has led my thinking towards alternatives to exhibiting in galleries and
ways to cut the middlemen out of the selling
equation. I quite like the idea of a backdrop of a flower border to my
paintings and a birdsong soundtrack. With luck I could even have my own Damien Hirst butterflies. So rather than contemplating all the hurdles, maybe it's time to work with my limitations and stretch the boundaries of how an artist can exhibit their work.
My house may need some TLC, but I have the prettiest cherry tree at the end of the garden.
Last week I bit the bullet and started a Facebook artist page A had been stalling on this, because I was waiting for the day when I eventually had the money to purchase a decent camera and take quality photographs of my artwork. This day is not likely to come any day soon. There will always be something else that funds need to be spent on, however a hand held camera phone is not going to give a professional impression. I have always struggled to photograph large reflective oil paintings. My new plan involved a tripod found in the local charity shop, a budget camera left here and forgotten for a while by a relative, that I might as well "borrow" and my new white photographic studio (the garden on a grey day covered in unseasonable snow). Follow the link above to see my results.
Using the snow as a white photographic studio.
I posted about my garden gallery dream, on my new Facebook page and got a helpful and positive response. Thanks Ruth ! My favourite way to spend free time is looking at art, being in a garden, drinking tea and eating cake. The actualisation of this is a way off yet. Time will always be scarce, I have children to look after and a house to clean but I believe it is something to work towards. Through my Facebook post I discovered Reminiscence Vintage a local business who supply beautiful vintage china, linen , bunting and artefacts and cater for afternoon tea events who are interested in working with artists. It seems that lots of peoples favourite things include art, cake and flowers. The pipe dream of an "On The Fence" exhibition could become a reality.
Just a thought, if anyone has a spare lorry, what about this for an idea. Instead of a mobile library, have a mobile gallery featuring a number of artists work inside with the sides of the truck advertising the idea. Take the art to the people, to the city, the village fete or just pull up outside a national gallery. You could even have a visitor's book and tea and cake! I'm sure it would get some publicity. Unfortunately I can't afford a lorry or have a HGV license. This one will probably have to remain a pipe dream.
This is one of my favourite nursery rhymes, I have started to think that's me with the broom:
There was
an old woman
Tossed up in a basket
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
Where she was going
I just had to ask it,
For in her hand she carried a broom.
"Old woman, old woman,
Old woman," said I,
"Please tell me, please tell me,
Why you're up so high?"
"I'm sweeping the cobwebs
Down from the sky,
And I'll be with you
By and by."
There are many things I would like to do that circumstance does not yet allow. Did I tell you I want to go to Venice? I have a big wish list of wants, but I have begrudgingly learned to honour the ordinary. I live in the Midlands, the centre of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, (wow, doesn't that sound like a magical place !) I can assure you the reality is often not. Or is it ? After all, was it not out of the run-down and polluted Black Country, that arose the gloomy mountains of Mordor in Tolkien's mind.
Yet because I live here, I feel land-locked, and often long for the sea. What is this condition in us that always longs for the other?. This is were my current painting sprang from. I don't live in a pretty town but it is on the edge of rolling hills. Between the dreary rows of terraced houses you can glimpse the countryside in the distance. I was walking back from the chip shop in the drizzling rain when the image for this painting came into my imagination.
Marking out.
In progress. Working title: Fabrication. Oil on canvas, 145 x 166 cm.
Detail.
Necessity is the mother of invention and there are infinite resources to be found when we make do and mend. How many of us as children, have sat in a laundry basket like a coracle and sailed away on a swirling seventies carpet. I loved the idea of magic carpets and remember sitting cross legged on a rug. Disappointed it wasn't working I began to construct daydreams instead. Imagination uses constraints to climb up. So I will see a landscape in a pile of laundry and go to Venice on a magic carpet for now
I have started painting this image above, because of Louise, my lecturer that died last
year. She really wanted me to create it after she saw my sketchbook version, so I will give it a go. It is a
landscape made out of patterns. The pattern of a landscape created from
what I had around the house: scraps of fabric, dishcloths, kitchen
roll.
The beginning of a Vuillard inspired landscape.
Patterns are great for suggestion. Whether the flickering flames of a fire, the lumps in ugly woodchip wallpaper, garish curtains or fading light or eyesight, you have to work with what you have. I particularly like the painted fabrics in paintings by Vuillard and Bonnard, and this is what inspired me to try and paint fabrics. It looks like fun.
Pierre Bonnard, The Red-Checkered Tablecloth
Matisse painted the same room and window again and again, with various props, even though he had the paradise of the French Riviera just outside. When I have a feeling of overwhelming constriction, or sense an imagined lack of freedom, it helps to get lost in films and literature or play music loud to replenish myself. Bathe in poetry and find yourself in it's depths. We always have ourselves and that is everything you need, even if it does not always seem like it. Most of us are lucky enough to have others to share life with also. On a bad day, instead of imagination there is always Google, and for travel, Google Earth.
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
―
Albert Einstein
I have not worked out yet whether I should explain my paintings or leave them for others to interpret on their own. As it is early days for me as a painter, I don't suppose it matters much either way. If it does, look away now.
This painting happened suddenly and was my response to a bad day. I just got all the swirling images in my mind that were gathering and put them out of my head and onto the paper. Here I could see them clearly, writhing undefended for me to examine. That same day was turned around as I transferred my sketch onto canvas and began filling in.
I was trying to come to terms with and integrate the gaping void between domestic imagery fed to us from the television and magazines, and the cold blooded reality of hard work and raw emotion as you fall into the role of motherhood.
The only true advice I wish I had received before becoming a mother is "Expect the unexpected, nothing is ever as it seems.". We have little experience to prepare us before embarking on our personal journey into motherhood. Of course this is true of fatherhood as well. Our dislocated society separates the births and deaths from our sanitised and independent lives. Few of our new generation have memories of the birth of siblings at home, or the final preparing of the body of a deceased loved one, as an opportunity to say goodbye. These are not easy things to face but they do not go away by hiding them. When the time comes we are unprepared and have to face these experiences with little support, and it soon has to be hushed up again. We have lost the support and guidance of women in our community. Community is a rare treasure not many of us have known.
So armed with our mothering magazines of perfect images we take our fragile selves into the labour wards like lambs to the slaughter. This may sound harsh, reality may be kind and often is, but babies are born prematurely everyday, many women don't have chance to consult their perfect birth plans as they are rushed into emergency caesareans. New mothers sink into the ambivalence of post natal depression and not everyone is fortunate enough to experience the spontaneous miracle of bonding with their child. Some parents replace their broken rose tinted glasses with an alcoholic haze.
The perfect ideal of a house in the country, in which we can be a domestic goddess is passed off to us through the media as "real", leaving the majority of us lacking. I love to watch these programmes and dream and have my fill of their virtual, vicarious pleasure. Equally it can lead to torment and dismay.
There is a phrase, "Follow me home to know me.". The fake kitchens bursting with le crueset; flowery china and copper bottomed pans are purpose built fabrications and often not the celebrities actual homes. In real celebrity homes adultery and temptations can be prevalent.
A cat curled up on a rug in front of an open fire turns into finding flea bites on your children's skin. The new cute kitten has defecated on your new comforting cushions, and left a dead bird behind the settee. Small mercy that the toddler didn't find it first. The open fire covers everything in dust and brings the extra job of cleaning up the ash and soot. We all have our dreams and then their are the practicalities never far away.
The baby in the painting is copied from a real photo of my poorly daughter, born three months early. When tragedies occur, someone still has to wash the dishes that are mounting up, put the Christmas tree up, do the festivities and put the Christmas tree back. The beautiful flowers in a vase fade and die and have to be thrown away, the bacteria filled water in the vase poured away. These simple yet heroic acts that keep a family going are often the responsibility of mothers. The little things, the disgusting things, the boring, relentless, unnoticed and essential things.
As I have got older I have learnt with great difficulty to let go of my Catherine Cookson ideals of how life should be, and to love the reality of what life actually is as it comes. A technicolour, 3D, scratch n sniff miracle. To turn chores into opportunities for contemplation and listening. We will all still have bad days but I try to face life clearly and openly and enjoy the miracles of having children and being alive.
In my painting there is a butterfly that can momentarily break you out of an inward cage of depression as you turn to look at it's beauty. A Georgian shop window, full of the promise of wonderful things reflects the storm beyond. A cottage with roses around the door, leads on to a pretty chintz cup and saucer, or is it clouds gathering. Will the oncoming storm be only a storm in a teacup. Have a cup of tea and gain some perspective, you never know what your future might hold. The gladioli symbolises strength and preparedness, and moral integrity. Exactly what a mother needs for consistency and to be a guide by good example. They are also a symbol for love at first sight, how it should be when a mother first holds her child.
Mausoleum. Oil on canvas. 32"x24". 2012.
I was brought up to care about what the neighbours think, to try to be nice and to please. These are good qualities in certain ways, to be conscientious and aware of your affect on others. It also leaves you particularly suggestible. I am learning to stand up for myself and believe in whatever I am, even if it does displease. This painting is not quite finished, I am going to work some more on the details, these are not good quality photos, but what does it matter. Until further notice I have put my cherished but sentimental notions in a mausoleum.
