Art is made to be seen, but does it always need to be shared?
How sharing my art made everything possible, and why I stopped
Last week I wrote about the fate of the 2021 animal/artefact series, which disappeared when the free line suddenly rose up in rebellion against a certain kind of neatness and care. To my surprise I’ve decided that this week will be the final installment of my art journey through time. I began writing on Substack in October, 2024, reflecting on my first art school experience at the age of 16. Today I’m talking about how sharing my work over the last fifteen years or so has made everything possible, and why, for now, this has come to an end.
I don’t intend to stop writing, but from now on I’m going to have to try to find responses to the art and discussions I find in the world around me; all the wonderful writing and sharing of art that I experience daily here on Substack and elsewhere. I’m looking forward to that.
…to engage with a dream is to completely attune yourself to your body, your purity, your strength, the force of your will, and also your greed, your impatience, your lust, your grief…
Enduring those forces is hard work. Dreams require hard work, every single day, and the work doesn’t end until you’re dead.
From the start of my return to painting, around 2008 and up until 2024, I shared most of what I was making on social media. I didn’t want to be precious or secretive about my images, or for showing them to become a big ego-challenging deal. I also knew that I had to protect myself from the kind of dogma and criticism that I had received at art school, so at first I didn’t advertise what I was doing. Everything went onto Flickr, which became a kind of online repository where I could see things from a distance and look at how they were evolving. It was all in the public domain, so I never had to worry about ‘putting it out there’. I knew no one would be looking anyway.
Eventually I moved on to Facebook, where I developed a work process of making and sharing, making and sharing, on an almost daily basis. I wanted to model a commitment to the process of making and then moving on, for myself, with the idea that this would not only stop me from feeling any potential self-consciousness, but also help me to avoid becoming too attached to whatever appeared. I wanted to learn how to accept imperfection, to get used to incompleteness.
It was a strategy. It got me moving, helped me fend off all the old ghosts and find my way in the dark. I had so much to learn about colour, line and subject matter, and sharing what I was doing helped me to make wonderful connections, form friendships, and find collaborators.
I let this way of working run for years. It was motivating, a way of carving myself a path forward without worrying too much about results. I was so determined that nothing was going to stop my art this time that I didn’t really notice that sometimes it didn’t feel quite so fun, that what I was doing could also feel subtly pressurised.
Maybe I could have switched at some point to a different way of doing things, but it was the only way I knew. Nonetheless, I can see now that, over time, I slowly began to get tired of having to show up every day for a habit that was gradually becoming somehow a little rigid and unforgiving. My studio walls were covered with ideas, mini-paintings, cut-outs, fragments of text. I would walk into the room and see so much wanting to speak and sing and cry, and feel that I just wasn’t up to the task. At that time the daily sharing on social media felt like an anchor in the midst of an unknown sea, a connection to friends and the world beyond my studio. It seemed essential.
I didn’t realise that I was slowly beginning to crowd myself with the very process that was originally intended to be freeing. I thought that the tension was unresolved emotional material, cold fingers from past experiences, mysterious blockages and resistances. I did my best to patiently turn everything over and examine the elements, one by one, in an attempt to understand.
And there were many things that I was only going to learn by persisting in the way that I did. For a long time I didn’t realise, for example, how both colour and my choice of subject matter affected me. The ancient ritual figures that I brought into my paintings - decontextualised as they were - turned out to be capable of moving archetypal energies that were fully alive within my own body and mind. As these combined with my use of colour I found that I was being drawn in to the very thing that I’d always been seeking – a kind of mysterious power, responses at depths that I was almost unaware of.
The idea of ‘the power of images’ captivated me for decades, but it’s only recently that I’ve understood that this is not just an intellectual fascination, but a visceral longing, which has created tangible effects. The images that I’ve made have somehow found their way to creating this power for me, within me. I always knew that I wanted to make the kind of art that for me was missing in the world; art that would make me catch my breath, that pulled me in, that took me somewhere. I didn’t know that finding or creating this kind of power would turn out at times to be almost too much; that it could be disturbing, and that it would need to be handled with care in terms of how it affected my nervous sytem.
What I know now is that I need to make myself a big space after completing a painting; that my images activate deep currents which need to be processed in silence and privacy, not suffer exposure.
The apparent need ‘to be seen’ screams at us from self-help books, social media, artistic advice, but does everyone actually want this? Not necessarily, or not always in the same way. I knew that I was working for myself, that I wasn’t trying to get likes; I knew about the traps that my ego could fall into. I stayed true to my own impulses. I also wanted to send my making out beyond myself, once it was done. As I had no interest in galleries or in trying to get involved in the contemporary art world, social media was my only means of connecting with people and releasing what had appeared.
What I didn’t see was that the constant sharing at some point began to colonise the parts of me that actually longed to remain private; to be unseen, to be known only to myself. Whatever it was that was moving in me to respond to colour, to use line in the way that I did, to fondle the subject matter that I was choosing, whatever that thing was, it wanted to be born in secret. To have a long conversation with only me before being sent out into the world.
In 2024 I made myself a huge space and decided to stop the relentless pressure to ‘keep showing up’. I let days and weeks go by without pressurising myself to make anything at all, just waiting, breathing in the clear air.
Everything went quiet. I began to feel the space around me. I began to write again.
I’m still making images, but mostly I’m not sharing them. I’m in the next stage of this process that I’ve been watching and documenting for so long, and I don’t want to analyse it, discuss it, or show it to anyone yet.
It’s quiet, and it’s spacious. At the moment my practice no longer needs to stabilise itself with reference to seeing eyes. For now, what I do references itself only to the sense impressions that move within this tiny portion of the world that is my awareness; the movement of my consciousness as it emerges mysteriously from flesh, muscle and bone.
Rilke, as usual, has the last word:
Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like a tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet, in The Marginalian
I totally get it dear Tamsin, the social media pressure sometimes gets into our system like a virus, it's horrible. And it's this feeling of everything or nothing: if you are out you disappear, if you are in you have to be fully in everyday everytime... It's exhausting
I love this so much. The big space - the endless sky of it all. I can spend so much time lying down and randomly strumming an instrument with no particular goal or end or making in me. I think I love the little songlets that arrive in those times and then fly away before I can capture them. My head tries to re-create; my heart knows that the visitation itself was the peace I so often long for.
Beautiful writing and connection. I often feel seen and heard and cradled in your words and images and observations …