Birmingham Museum and Art gallery

Birmingham Museum and Art gallery

I visited Birmingham’s Museum/Art Gallery yesterday and really enjoyed myself. Some of the paintings were breathtaking, painted hundreds of years ago with (what I would class as) inferior materials which often were partly to blame for the untimely demise of the artist. I guess at least their work went up in value though… Little compensation I imagine. There was a sculptural figure of the Angel Lucifer (pictured) which I can only describe as freaky, no other word quite conveys my feelings appropriately. The body was sculpted with a male model as the reference and the head was sculpted using a female as reference, this added to its grotesque quality as the eyes were odd and hugely disproportionate which I assume was intentional. Considering Lucifer was described as “the most beautiful of all the angels” in the statement accompanying the piece, the sculptor obviously had very different perceptions of beauty to my own but maybe that is just because we were born in different eras.  Then my peace, tranquillity and quiet pondering was ruined by several small children entering the room going “Ewww, you can see his bum and willy”. Ah the wonders of childhood… I do not get on well with the teacup humans.

Anyway to give you fair warning this is about to turn in to a rant, a rant about some of the differences between then and now. (Not a rant about children, tempting though that may be at this point.)

            Artists were only considered artists if they had talent; an artisan was a master of his trade and it was almost exclusively “his” trade. (That part I’m not so keen on, women have as much right to do everything as men do, we have just been rather controlling in the weird little power-game that is history to feel superior to women even though we clearly are not.)  He had skill; he had to have skill to make a living trading in his artwork. He couldn’t just splash some paint on to a canvas and say it was abstract. I feel old starting a rant like this but; “these days” you don’t have to actually have ANY skill whatsoever, you just have to pay people to make the art for you then claim it as yours because you thought of it.  It has been called “the art of not making” along with some much less flattering names. You may have gleaned with your heightened sense of perception that I am against this general state of affairs. You would be absolutely correct.

            I get angry about this, I also feel jealousy bubbling away below the surface as these people who are often considered “great artists of our time” and their art is seen by millions of people whilst truly skilled people get overlooked. It is unfair but that is life. I wonder what the history books will say about this era concerning the artistic movement. You can’t really call it the “Untalented Movement” or the “I wanted to be an artist so that is what I will do regardless of my actual ability to draw or sculpt or do anything useful movement”… that last one isn’t particularly catchy.

            I feel torn asunder in my own argument sometimes because I believe such things as ‘found objects’ can be art if placed in the right context or if you are made to perceive them in a different way. The artist never claims those pieces as his/her own work or idea, they did not commission that piece to be made for their cause. In my head I suppose this is the difference between people of no talent who claim the right as artist to something someone else makes whereas the artist who can cause you to perceive something ordinary as extraordinary has a talent in their ability to change your perception.

            So yes, the gallery. (This will not be the most linear thing you will read in your life, but you’re not my English Teacher and hopefully you actually want to be reading this so in theory you shouldn’t give a damn.)  They had some beautiful examples of Japanese belt adornments, yes they have a proper name but I have a terrible memory which is why I took notes!

            I have had a fascination with the English variety of these things which don’t appear to have a collective name but tended to be highly decorated perfume bottles or tobacco pouches. To see the same things but from a different culture was of particular interest to me, they had a name for each piece of it, the clasp at the top which attached it to the belt was intricately carved, the bead separating the clasp from the box or bottle had its own story and the boxes themselves were awe inspiringly beautiful. The concept of spending so much time, care and money on something so small and functional is almost alien to me coming from the mass-production era and the throw-away society in which we now live.  

Where is my artistic direction taking me?

Where is my artistic direction taking me?

Simple enough question… but something I have been struggling with for quite some time. Where is my art heading? What are my main influences? How do I want to get my art ‘out there’? What is my target audience?

The last question prompted my tedious pondering about my artistic direction. It happened during a marketing discussion with a few friends, it occurred to me that I couldn’t create ‘products’ (which is a term I hate being used for art/craft pieces but it serves a purpose within a business context I suppose) across a varied price range when I didn’t have any starting point; specifically I didn’t have a particular series of work which I wanted to carry forward and develop further.

Artistically I am at a standstill. I left University with a Masters Degree which taught me practically nothing, after using each three-month semester span to investigate a different area I wanted to play with in my art I never developed anything really thoroughly. I guess because nothing held my attention long enough (no I don’t have ADD) or I came to a standstill because I couldn’t see a way to develop my project due to the limitations of the facilities available to me or the limitations of the material itself.

I started working two days a week for a glassmaker not long after leaving university, I then picked up a second job a few months later Quality Assurance testing for a sandpaper factory. I know, totally glamorous right? The steel-toe-capped boots, dust mask and white rubber gloves are all the rage this season don’tcha know… ¬-¬

Anyway that’s what I have been doing for the last year and a bit. During that year I went a bit mad not long after leaving uni, having complete freedom and not having the need to explain my art on a deeper level (or make up some arty-sounding bollocks to justify its existence) I decided to make a flamingo-drawn pink hearse. Glass flamingo and laser-cut metal legs and hears made up my creation. I love it, it pushed me way out of my comfort zone and I was high with the elation of creating something just because I wanted to.  

After that expensive little endeavour I cooled off a bit and settled in to work, work, work.  I saved up, tried to find a house, tried to keep my relationship from collapsing, all the ‘normal’ boring real life stuff. Honestly sometimes I get excited about curtains, it’s just sad.

Clearly I was devoid of artistic motivation. Being in this rut for so long has made me question the reasons for my lack of development now I have the freedom to spread my metaphorical wings unhindered by tutorials and boxes to tick.

I have been reading a lot lately, buying arty magazines, trawling the internet and following social networking pages run by artists and galleries. Clearly my interest is still alive and it is very healthy. I tend to follow/stalk illustrators with a quirky or unique style, urban vinyl (also known as designer toys) artists, graffiti artists and glass makers (obviously). These are the areas I am most interested in and I always have been; I wrote my dissertation on the designer toy movement in 2008. The first three of these areas have a tendency to overlap, with graffiti artists and illustrators modifying designer toy blanks whilst some graffiti artists shift their focus to illustration as a way to make their work available for purchase and to create an income, after all you can’t really buy a wall and decent spray-paint isn’t cheap. Also most urban vinyl designers start out as illustrators but use the movement as a way to make their characters 3D and open out in to a broader market.

For a long time I have been trying to figure out a way to make my glass-work overlap the boundaries of designer vinyl (here I feel it necessary to point out that not all pieces within this movement are actually made of plastic) and graffiti-art.

I have thought about leaving small or even large glass pieces in public, the issue there is that if someone smashes the piece and hurts themselves or someone else then I wouldn’t feel ok doing that. On the other hand they wouldn’t exactly know it was me… and it would probably be their own stupid fault, and Saturday nights everywhere result in broken shards of glass littering town centres. Can you tell I’m trying to talk myself in to it?  Also glass is expensive to buy/make etc so it would cost me a fair bit to do it, it would be worth it if I could glass-bomb the front of the Tate or something though. Glass-bombing sounds a tad violent doesn’t it? Whereas yarn-bombing sounds positively fuzzy by comparison.

The type of glass I would want to… deposit/leave/bomb… in public areas would also live firmly outside the box of what is considered a normal glass form. I would leave cute looking, brightly coloured pieces, most likely with eyes; something that surprises people when they touch it and discover that it is glass not plastic.

Fixing them would be an issue as well, for somewhere that they would definitely not be permanent (outside the Tate for example) then I guess P.V.A or no fixative at all, it would dissolve when it rained so it would have to be done in dry weather initially. This is England so probably not a smart choice. Wallpaper-paste might work... they would probably just look like they were sat in small piles of vomit though.  For a more permanent position i.e. somewhere they could not easily be reached, I think a two-part epoxy resin like Araldite or some such similar beastie would work well, although it takes time to mix it up and the idea of ‘bombing’ is to do it quickly then leave without getting caught.  I now have an image of myself sat up a tree furiously mixing glue whilst a policeman saunters along watching me to ask what it is I think I am doing.  Maybe there is a self-mixing one out there. Maybe something like Bostick as it has a bit of give to it so glass would be less likely to shatter and if it sticks to the tree branch then it wouldn’t impede growth.  (Clearly my thoughts about glue and epoxy resins are giving you a thoroughly titillating read.) I think I will be testing this theory in my local park.  Bird-shaped glass blobs would look good sat in a row high up on a tree branch.

So the point I began with, or the point this is leading up to, I forget which, was/is that I need to explore my artwork and just have fun with it rather than trying to fit in to any pigeonholes or caring what people think about it. I am always interested to hear how people interpret my work because they see it in a way I have never even considered before, but this should not steer me in any creative direction because that makes it partly someone else’s creation and not entirely mine. Whilst in higher education I was always told where my art should be going or how I should make it more conceptual/more abstract/more developed/less stabby/less literal/less ‘out-there’. I was even told that I should maybe do something “a bit more normal” which I presume actually meant ‘stop using bondage pictures in your work because I don’t know how to deal with it and/or have no idea how to mark it’. He was my least favourite “teacher”. Well I guess he definitely taught me what I didn’t want to be.

This is my time and I shall embrace the whole world not just the metaphorical white plinth of societies’ expectation.

PK

P.S. Higher education is a sham, don’t do it! They take all your money and tell you that you need to tick boxes to pass which steers your art, if you do go, my advice would be to (almost) completely ignore what your tutors say and plough on with your own development. This will allow you to take advantage of the facilities available to you on the course and make, make, make loads of stuff so you have some stock to sell when you graduate to fund your ongoing arty shenanigans. End Rant.

First post!

So I have finally started a blog! 

I am an artist who wants to ramble about all kinds of arty things. I'm predominantly a graffiti artist but I sculpt, I paint with brushes as well as spray cans, I cast resin... oh and I blow glass sometimes to. 

I have been writing stuff down for a long time on my pc but have just never gotten round to actually starting a blog. I need to go out and take some pics of my work at some point as well because I guess that would help you see what it is I actually do. 

I am just starting out with this whole blogging thing so you will have to be patient with me whilst I learn how to do this crap. 

Here is a picture of a mental fluffy running dog to keep you going for now.