Time for another state of the project post I think.

Well it’s fair to say that the every day aspect of the project has gone decidedly awry. This was caused partly by my complete creative exhaustion after Easter but it’s also not been helped by the night classes coming to an end around the same time. They only run two terms of the year and efforts to find something to fill in April to October proved fruitless. Nothing runs over the Summer, and anything that covers the final term doesn’t want to take students on that haven’t been there all year (understandably). Quite apart from being an obvious source of material for every-day-art the classes also kept me forced to work. Also, as hinted in the last of these posts, the back dated work is drying up so I can’t cheat any more. If it’s up, then it’s new.

I keep saying I didn’t put hard and fast rules on the project because I knew I’d break them, and hence the project, if I did and that’s still the case. If anyone who said the project would last for three months posting every day feels they’ve won the sweepstake then congratulations to them. As for it being the end of the project – not even close. It will simply change to follow my direction, which is still with the painting, still with the abstract bizarrely, but I’m at a bit of an empasse as regards specific content at the moment and as such so is every-day-art. On one hand I want to push ahead with some new approaches – I’m tempted to break into oils as I’ve been looking at a lot of oil paintings and thinking that I just can’t get that texture and layering of paint with the acrylics, and I’m currently utterly besotted by cloud formations and I’d love to be getting to grips with those – but I’m also aware that the short time I’ve been doing the abstracts isn’t really enough time to fully explore anything. The artists I admire spent years doing the same thing until they’ve wrung every last drop of learning and inspriation from it. I firmly believe that the true insight only comes that way, despite the quick fullfillment that can be had from beginners’ luck. I’m jumping from rock-to-rock so fast that it’s fair to say I’ve not enjoyed everything each rock has to offer. From that perspective, I should do more of the texture/mood based pieces; maybe more music inspired paintings. They’re fun quite apart from anything else. I don’t know basically – only time will tell and I’m not closing off any avenues. Perhaps you’ll be seeing some seriously left-field experiements over the next couple of months!

Tomorrow is a bank holiday, and I am determined to get the easel set up again and do something new. How new it is will depend on how much like painting I feel I suspect. I’m also going to spend some time gathering up the body of work I’ve built over the last few months and getting it up on the website with a price on it so if there’s anything you’ve seen that you fancy it may well appear. It’s filling the spare room and I’m not as sentimentally attached to my work as I used to be, which stems from a confidence in being able to repeat it (or at least something of similar quality). Another unexpected bi-product of every day art!