It does seem to be the case that when you start any piece of art work you can never tell where it is going to end up. It can be that what in the imagination seemed to be a great idea fizzles out in disappointment. On the other hand a doodle, or a little exercise intended just to keep your hand in can blossom suddenly into something worthwhile. That happened to me yesterday and today.
In the absence of anything that I thought was a serious project, I decided to draw a couple of cacti from the conservatory, with just the intention of keeping my hand in. It has been rather like an ambush, however, in which the work jumped out from its place of concealment and demanded to be taken seriously. I’m a long way from finishing it yet, and there is always the possibility that it will fall apart. It was greatly encouraging this afternoon when my wife came into the studio and spontaneously said how much she liked it. (Silence, on the other hand, is always dangerous!) At this point I know exactly what I want to achieve, and I’m really looking forward to getting back into the task tomorrow.
That has not been the only surprise of the day. I mentioned in a previous blog that I have started to subscribe to he art magazine Apollo. It has been welcome surprise to discover just how rewarding that has been. The best way of describing the experience is by way of contrast with the other journal I have been reading for many years now, The Artist. This concentrates very much on how to do it. Very often, however, my response this kind of writing has been that I don’t want to do that kind of thing anyway. The Apollo articles, by way of contrast, leave me with the impression that the range of possibilities of what it means to engage with art is enlarged. This afternoon, for example, I read a piece about two French artists, Charles Meryon and Leopold Chauveau. (No: I had never heard of them either.) They both were fascinated by the idea of monsters, such as gargoyles. I had never previously thought that the kind of work they produced could be regarded seriously as art, but this was a real eye-opener.
Thinking about it afterwards over a cup of tea I reflected on the experience yesterday evening of watching the first of a series of TV programmes headed up by Grayson Perry, in which he attempts to engage people in art activities. It was interesting from a variety of standpoints, but it did occur to me that what Perry is doing is putting over a rather focussed view of what it constitutes to produce art. Like The Artist, although in a very different way, he seemed to me to be steering his audience into a specific manner of seeing and doing things, rather than expanding their range of possibilities. No ambushes there, I fear.