Lanyon Quoit (Cornwall)
Should I draw ? Should I paint ? Should I write ? Should I do what I do best ? How can I make time for these activities or any combination thereof ? What happens in the arena when I am disappointed in my performance ? Is it okay to surrender ? Who makes the rules up ? Why do I have to follow them ?
I suspect Artists might be a somewhat selfish breed.
I do what I want to. I do what I enjoy. I try not to be motivated by guilt, by the feeling that I should or must or need to do anything. This is a suggestion that hidden in the perfidy that is procrastination there might be a hidden seam of gold. In my case yesterday if the BBC 4 documentary "The Art of Cornwall" lured me away from my metaphorical easel - so be it.
All these creative activities I feel are intertwined. After all they do originate from that same dark cave - somewhere in my seething little cerebrum. The ways that they are linked is the interesting concept in a world rapidly becoming networked up to its armpits. I read a letter from Robert Genn and it leads me to a writer (shamefully) I've never heard of, and I search the writer out and the work reminds me of another writer. That is ; in Mr Genn's contemplation concerning the artistic banishment of the blues a quotation by the writer Annie Dillard : “You need a room with no view so memory can meet imagination in the dark.” strikes a resonant chord. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" in which the necessities for artistic creativity are mused upon. Reading that online leads me somehow to the other side of the equation. The sacrifices that an artist makes in the production of his work. Family dynamics and obsessional drive somehow point me to the portraiture of Lucian Freud and from there to the Paint as Flesh connection with Jenny Saville. The fizzing of these ideas keeps me awake until six am in the morning (luckily accompanied by a very fine England cricket display down under).
The point is that this movement between word and image, between the historic and the contemporary, between the deliberate and the random is itself a creative imperative. It is a journey that in itself is enjoyable and in its documentation can lead down assorted different and diverse directions. If that journey in turn creates something new and you enjoy that creation that is all the motivation and validation that is required.
