I realised today what a difference there is between actually engaging directly with art, and doing things that are related to art. I have spent the best part of a week engaged with the revision and updating of my website (as some of you might have discovered). Although this is a useful way of deploying my energies and I’m sure it contributes in the long run to my artistic activity, it has been a duty rather than a pleasure.
Yesterday and today, however, I managed to get back into painting again, and I’ve finished a small piece left over from my “Malta” project, which I intend to exhibit finally in November. It has been a real pleasure to be working again, despite the caution I expressed yesterday about my choice of support.*
It has been a curious experience to spend some part of today helping a colleague to hang a small exhibition of his work. For some reason this has felt closer to doing art itself, rather than just an activity that is “about art”. This might appear to be strange, because the focus of the activity has been somebody else’s work, and not my own. Even so, two aspects of it have been directly rewarding in a way that working on the website has not been.
The arrangement of the work on the walls of the gallery is a task that requires aesthetic discrimination, so that it isn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that a well-displayed exhibition is a kind of work of art in itself. The other, and possibly more important, aspect of the task has been the communication that has taken place with a colleague. Although it might be thought that work on the web-site is also “communication”, it is almost entirely one-way. Hanging the exhibition involved sharing of ideas about art and gaining insight into the working practices of a fellow artist. This, of course, has had the effect of making me think about how I go about things, and the choices I make in the process of producing art.
This has been “nearly art”, although perhaps “not quite art”, but definitely superior to just “about art”.
*Resolved by resort to a softer pastel and the use of cotton buds as “stubbing pencils”.