I spent a good part of the morning sorting out my disorderly heap of CDs, containing records of my art activities. As expected there was some junk to be thrown away, and a great deal of systematic labelling to be done, so that I can actually access things for which I have a need. There was one other pleasant surprise. I turned up a recording of an interview I did for the local radio station back in December 2005.
In those days I was organising a regular display of art in the bar area of the Priestley Centre (one of the local theatres.) The exhibition in question was a group show. The recording had me walking round the exhibition, looking at the pictures in turn with the reporter, commenting on them and responding to her questions. It was a great reminder of the occasion. I’m still in contact with some of the people who showed there, particularly Pat Belson, Paul Hudson and Bob Thompson, all of whom are still active as artists in West Yorkshire. It was nice to be reminded also of the late Bill Redburn, for whom I curated an individual exhibition later on, and wrote a critical essay on his work.
Possibly the biggest surprise for me was to hear how easily and fluently I was able to discuss each picture with the reporter. Although I say it myself I was quite impressed. I would hate to think that I make a better critic than an artist!
The Herculean labour of weeding and indexing my heap of art records on CD is actually getting along quite well. I now have an orderly drawer containing fourteen of them. Five have been destroyed as either unusable or uninteresting, and there remain fifteen more to be assessed and documented tomorrow.* The experience is a varied one, oscillating between “Stone me! Didn’t I do some dreadful old things back then?” to “Hey! Actually this is really not bad at all!”
*That is just the art-related ones. When that is completed there will still remain two file boxes full of others to be processed, although I regard these as far less urgent. I really will have to be kicking my heels in order to persuade me to get into that stuff.