Who knew that making art would be so complicated?
Welcome to Art Pilgrim. I hope you find some juicy investigations here and that you’ll feel like having a conversation with me! Below is the first post I published on Substack: the historic backdrop to a lifetime of making art and not making art, the context for all the questions that came afterwards….
For most of my life I’ve felt completely alone with my questions about art. I was 16 years old when I left home to go to art school. It was the mid-seventies, and art schools were focussed on being wild, confrontational, and apparently only interested in abstraction. I got some basic training in drawing and painting at my local art school, but when I moved to St Martin’s School of Art in London all of that stopped. On my first day there, a tutor intent upon ‘challenging our expectations’ sent a wind-up toy across the floor as another tutor was introducing us to the course. Some weeks later I was asked to react to a mattress while being videoed. These are the two stand-out memories of my art Foundation Course.
The culture that seeped its way into my impressionable bones at that time made it clear to me that if I really wanted to be artist, I would not be going anywhere near the life room, where a few reactionary oldsters were still enjoying making oil paintings of the figure. So I joined the serious artists’ room, where everyone was working on enormous abstract canvases and talking about how to get into the best London galleries. I remember making something big out of paper and wire, with curves. I had no idea what was going on. I knew that I was lost. I decided that if making art meant pulling something out of myself with no guidance from the outside, I would have to take a year off to travel, in the hope that something might come into me which I could then use to direct my art.
It took a bit longer than I anticipated. I was 33 when I finally enrolled on a degree in Indian art, architecture and philosophy. Meanwhile, living and working in Oman, Italy, North India, and Japan, I filled up with sights and smells and colours. I wandered souks full of African fabrics, ancient copper and gold. I travelled the entire length of India by train, staying in endless green, blue and pink hotel rooms; was lulled to sleep in an ancient Tibetan kingdom by outsized copper horns; watched bodies crackle and burn before finally tumbling into the Ganges on Varanasi steps. I gazed at ancient Etruscan city walls, little-known frescoes in crumbling churches, magnificent cathedrals; rented a house amongst sunflowers in a burnt sienna field. I lived under a Himalayan snow peak, watching monsoon clouds move across the valley as I listened to my students practising traditional Tibetan songs in the corridors outside my room. I watched tofu-makers dressed in indigo sieve vats of milky white fluid in the street where I lived; rang enormous verdigris-stained bells in ancient wooden temples; watched sunlight filtering through endlessly repeating squares of rice paper. I was saturated with impressions. And the contemporary European or American art worlds made even less sense to me than before.
In Art Pilgrim I want to explore questions about art that I carried with me for over twenty years of making no art at all, and also think about current versions of these questions after being a so-called full-time artist for the last fifteen years. As I unpack my memories and dig for the questions I hope that what I explore might offer some company to anyone else who has queries about art, or who wants to make art or play with image-making, but who may be feeling overwhelmed, dissatisfied or confused. Perhaps I’ll also find some playmates with over-active brains like mine who just think about these things and find them endlessly fascinating!