Do you make resolutions to yourself at New Year? It struck me today that perhaps this is an idiosyncratic British habit that isn’t found everywhere. (I do know that my regular readers come from a variety of different places on the globe, and not all of them from English-speaking countries by any means.) It is not something I normally do, but as we sat and drank coffee together this morning my wife suggested that we ought to do it. She could think of several things that she needed to do in the coming year, and wanted the added stimulus of having actually written down a commitment to doing so.
As it turned out, I think that my efforts were probably a bit feeble. If I stick to them I will have achieved everything I resolved to do within the first month. It didn’t seem very ambitious, but it was all I could think of at the time. As the day has progressed, however, I have developed a clearer sense of what I might expect of myself in the coming year. It might sound a bit nebulous, but I do feel that in the past couple of years my work as an artist has suffered from being rather “safe”. Perhaps I ought to commit myself to taking a few more artistic risks.* The question is, however, how should I go about that?
There are several possibilities. I think that I mentioned in a recent post one of the ideas with which I returned from Italy in the autumn. I have several reference images (sketches and photographs) I put together of the church door in a little Sicilian town called Erice. They have been own my mind for several reasons, and I really have had no clear idea as to what I ought to do with them. My taken-for-granted mode has been to think about the problem in terms of my habitual pastels. Maybe that solution is just too comfortable. Anyway, it just feels wrong. Perhaps I should scare myself stiff and try watercolour. Now there’s a thought!
I think I’ll resolve to live (in an artistic sense at least) dangerously.
*Not physical ones. I think my wife is a bit fed up of me knocking bits off myself when I’m out climbing.