You are no doubt familiar with all the cliche characterisations of artists–as romantics, as insane, as visionaries, as condemned to starve in attics, and so on, and so on. I discovered a new image today. I’m not entirely sure that it applies to all artists, but certainly it describes my life at the moment. I seem to be caught in a never-ending cycle of tasks, in which the apparent completion of one just leads directly to the commencement of the next, equality onerous and frustrating.
The revision of my web-site, although not quite complete, has made enormous strides, and it does look as if it will be possible to tie it all up (for the time being) by the end of the week. In the process, however, I have found myself implicated in another task that promises to be equally intimidating.
I wanted to check the information about several of my pieces, for inclusion in the “galleries” on the site. Ever since I began to work as an artist I have tried to keep a record of all of my work, in a series of log-books. These record not only a photograph of every piece, but the medium in which it was done, the size of it, the nature of the support, and the date on which it was completed. Then there is a record of sales, and the price at which each item was sold. The log is often a place in which I can record all kinds of other details relevant to each piece. It has become rather less detailed as time has gone by (the series starts in September 2001) but it is still a valuable resource for several reasons.
Today I wanted to check the measurements of several pieces, and began to discover the there were, in fact, several lacunae in the record, and some records had got out of order. Perhaps foolishly I decided that I would try to get the material back into shape, and complete the gaps in it. Oh dear! Things were rather worse than I had thought.
Thinking back to last night’s viewing of The Court Jester I was reminded of Danny Kaye’s confusion between “the vessel with the pestle” and “the chalice from the palace”….realising, of course, that I had overlooked entirely the place in the scheme of things of “the flagon with the dragon”. In short, it was a bit of a mess, and despite having spent several hours trying to get it ship-shape during the day there remain questions I still have to address. (“Yea, verily, yea!” if you follow my reference.) When that is done, of course, I realise that the collection of images I keep on CDs needs to be taken in hand. Oh! and when that is finished I should turn my attention to the state of disorder of my storage racks.
*In case you’ve forgotten, he was the character from Greek mythology who was condemned permanently to roll a large rock up a hill. It kept rolling back down to the bottom.