We are planning to move to a new home in the near future. Of course, having lived in our present house for twenty-seven years we have accumulated a large amount of stuff, not all off which we really need to take with us. This sorting process is going to involve a good deal of time and effort, and in that realisation we have started the task in good time. An early candidate for the weeding treatment is, of course, the hoard of art-work I have accumulated. There is a plan-chest in my studio the contents of which are largely things which, for one reason or another, I believed at the time would be worthwhile keeping, although I am not sure I could ever have been very precise about why that might be that case.
Progress has been good so far. Yesterday I was fairly ruthless with the drawer containing landscape sketches. Today it has been the turn of the material I have accumulated from the various life-drawing classes I have attended over the last quarter of a century. For the life of me I could not be very precise about some of the things in there. I suspect that when I have tried a new medium, for example, some specimen has been kept. The selection process has been quite merciless, however, only keeping items which I thought were examples of good drawing. This has brought its own surprise.
It was certainly a surprise to discover that most of the pieces I thought were worthy of note were drawings in which the portrait of the sitter had been of greater interest than mere “figure drawing”. I have never really thought of myself as a portrait artist, and nearly all of the occasions on which I have tried this task have been informal sketches rather than finished “pictures”. I think that I am right in saying that I have only ever exhibited one of these. Even so, I have emerged from this experience wondering whether it might be interesting to explore this kind of work more seriously.
It is certainly the case that my landscape work has been feeling, in recent months, as if it has rather lost direction. Probably an early candidate for experiment will be my poor, long-suffering wife, but I have no idea where I might head after that.