The following is an extract from writing i am doing as part of my new doctoral studies: it’s from an opening section in which i consider lenses through which to view or analyse my own published work. The lenses are as writer, researcher, artist and explorer. It’s essentially an auto-ethnographic approach to consider where my work comes from, and where it may go. I share this as part of #WorkingOutLoud: it may not make much sense to others.
The most reassuring thing about being an artist is that you are one as soon as you make your first mark, and yet you will never become the one you hope to be.
To be an artist is a start line, not an end one.
I cannot draw people. Or hands.
Or faces, which, i guess, are part of people too.
I can draw boats, landscapes, and trees.
The closest i came to being trained was in architectural illustration, when i worked in a museum of timber framed buildings. Almost as soon as i had mastered this art, i abandoned it, although i retain a love of clean inked lines, which have most recently reappeared in my illustrations of leaves for ‘The Humble Leader’.
Architectural illustration is all about scale, accuracy, and clarity. But i remember an architect, whose family had made their fortune from paintbrushes, showing me how to add in shade, a subversive practice that bought depth and character to the clinical.
Light and shadow are common themes in my work.
To say that one is an artist is a little like saying that you breathe or eat. Art is a hard discipline to define, perhaps most easily understood by absence: if it is not essential, nor purposeful, if it is not scientific, or replicable, then perhaps it is art. Although, of course, art may be all of these things too, if it so desires.
Art may be anything, but is often taken to mean something within which the ‘self’ is invested.
The contemporary debate is about whether Artificial Intelligences can create ‘art’, or if in fact creativity is an exclusively human feature.
This may be to miss the maxim that art is in the eye of the beholder. If i see it, like it, hate it, or hang it on my wall, it may fulfil the role of art, even if you say it is not.
I tend towards the view that art is a compulsion of the human condition: if we cannot rationalise or justify, perhaps we can illustrate.
Imperfection
My art, like my writing, is highly imperfect: indeed, seeks out such imperfection. I have little affinity or attraction to the photorealistic, or indeed, to perfect photography. The more tenuous the connection to the ‘real’, the more appealing the expression.
With art as my language, my voice is not descriptive, but rather spatial. I tend not to draw ‘things’ but rather the space within which things may be perceived.
There is nothing radical in this understanding: sculptors use space (as delineated by materials), or materials (contextualised within space) for exactly this purpose. As do architects. Painters may do something similar, and the easiest metaphor for this relates to the representation of snow: you may do so with white paint, or black ink, the former to ‘layer it down’, the latter to define the space within which your imagination may choose to lay it. White paper may help in this choice.
Choreographers use similar notions of space to the sculptor: their notation imbues the idea into the material, in this case the dancer, within three dimensional space. And in turn, the dancer invests themself into the space, choosing in turn to trace space with limb and form, something the fire dancer makes explicit, especially with a long exposure at night.
The sweeping limbs of the dancer speak as the poet, with fluid movement and grace. Although an opposite yet equally valid expression is through fracture and discord. We can stand within, or opposed, to structure.
Art is about choices, and hence how we are informed may impact our output.
I studiously avoid becoming informed. I have read no books, attended no courses, asked for no feedback, and like what i like. I am not seeking to be better.
My writing has improved: without a shadow of doubt the discipline of #WorkingOutLoud and the habit of daily blogging have made me a far better writer than i was.
But not so the art.
Don’t get me wrong: my illustrations are significantly ‘better’ than they were, in terms of clarity, and quality, and i have developed an entire visual vocabulary around my work, but i am not a better artist. Just a prolific one. And a broader one.
I am never wrong
In contrast to every other aspect of my voice, performance, and work, my art is never, ever wrong.
Every picture i draw, photo i take, print that i make, is exactly perfect to what i intended it to be. No shadow, scratch, smudge or blur is out of place.
Partly this is because i devolve no agency to judge, nor adapt to feedback. I seek no betterment, beyond a desire to listen should you tell me that you love it.
This is not arrogance, but relates back to that absolute certainty that i am at the start. And that art is breath.
I said before that i write for myself, and yet am willing, hungry even, to find fault in my writing. The process of #WorkingOutLoud holds imperfection as methodology and process. It is implicit in my work.
Yet i do not #WorkOutLoud through my art. My art is my breath, my voice, and it is intended as a ragged gasp.
Art as artefact, art as practice
I should distinguish here between art as ‘artefact’ and art as ‘practice’.
In terms of artefacts, i frequently #WorkOutLoud, to share illustrations, and work in progress. But that is not the same is #WorkingOutLoud on the process or voice of art, or the creative language of my art.
The artefact is a thing, whilst art is my voice.
Everything sketched
The artefacts of my art are all imperfect, but that is why they are sketches. A sketch is by definition only a partial representation, possibly as simple as a single line.
These works are intended to change. I frequently draw and redraw the same idea, through different lenses, in different ways.
Over time my illustration for the blog, which is the primary output, has evolved significantly but unlike my written work, this has not been through feedback and dialogue, at least not in a conscious way.
Instead, i think i have developed a broad visual grammar and style, and then slowly evolved and expanded it. This is in terms of colour pallet and iconography, typography, metaphor, and spatial design. Or to put it another way: i’ve learned to represent ideas, in two dimensional space, as part of a broad body of work. And this work increasingly has coherence both within individual projects, and between projects.
All of this is in stark contrast to digital, where permanence is only ever transitory. Perhaps that impermanence in my digital art has led to my comfort with oils.
An example would be the illustration for ‘Power and Potential’, ‘Quiet Leadership’ and ‘The Humble Leader’.
Quiet Leadership sees the ‘Organisation as Ecosystem’, and follows the seasons with the growth of a tree.
‘Power and Potential’ explores power through the storm, at sea. But it’s an extension of the physical landscape, and uses imagery of motion.
‘The Humble Leader’ is one of only two books illustrated ‘physically’, this one with pen and ink, but it takes the trees from ‘Quiet Leadership’, and the individual leaves, and uses each for a chapter. They represent things being blown in the wind.
julianstodd
Julian Stodd's Learning Blog 