There's been a long gap. This much is entirely evident. Simply looking at the previous entry below will confirm that the gap can almost be measured in months, although the gap in my mind is longer. That latter gap measures just how long it has been since I last felt engaged as an artist. More to the point, it measure how long it has been since I last felt like an artist. It has been quite a while. As I write this, I am resisting the urge to look back over the last few months of entries, to measure the gap.
Last year was a very busy year for me artistically. I created two bodies of work (one of which may potentially be ongoing) and co-created another. There were also quite a few shows. Somehow, in the darkening winter months, as 2012 wound to a close, my train seemed to jump its rails and slowly grind to a halt. Looking around now, those rails don't even seem visible, as if a heavy snow has fallen, blanketing the ground and covering the tracks. Perhaps the tracks weren't even there and in the way of a dream, the track was actually one in a forest and I've wandered away from it and the falling snow has erased my footprints. Lost in a forest, all alone.
Is this some form of artistic block? At present, I doubt it. In my mind a block of that kind is associated with a desire to create but not the inspiration, nor the necessary ability to do so. I could be wrong.
Where I am, instead, is lost in that snow-frosted forest, where no desire to create exists. I wrote earlier that I don't feel much like an artist, when the truth is that I don't feel like much like anything. I am currently a void. This is not a feeling I particularly want to share. Avoid a void. Nonetheless this empty, in between place is where I am.
While I know that making and sharing art is what makes me who I am, it is not something that I can simply force into being. I know full well that there are processes I can engage in, stepping stones I can stumble over, that will take me back to that place, yet even those are too much to ask.
Snow. Void. Blank. Empty. Flat. This is part of the circle, the revolving circle of creation, the snake eating its own tail, revolver eternal. I do not like it here.
Friday, 22 February 2013
Saturday, 12 January 2013
This week
This week has been a week of flying above the endless, northern hemispherical blanket of thick cloud, whitely shining above, darkly shading below, blue skies and glaring sun seen through small mottled windows. This week has been a week of crossings, the crossing of an ocean and the crossing of half a continent. It has been a week of four airports, uncountable departure gates, suitcases and carry-on luggage. It has been a week with security and immigration and customs and security and boarding passes, body scans, seats by the window and in flight entertainment. It has been a jet lag and head full of the cold week. A week of looking around and seeing more sunshine in the winter than I am used to, almost three more hours a day and coughing my lungs up and sneezing endlessly, nose running, sleep slipping. It has been a week of remembering how to be me when I am not being that other me and taking it easy while my body adjusts to a six hour time difference and sucks down vitamins and herbs and tries to run out a winter cold. This week has been a week when I returned to America, to Arkansas, to Fayetteville. This week has not been a week for art. I'll see what I can do next week!
Saturday, 5 January 2013
The rest is just detail
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| Split, mixed media on panel, 50x76cm / 20x30in |
Anyway, enough of that silliness. First up, I am very happy to announce that I have completed five new paintings. With the exception of Split, which is shown above, these pieces were all ones that have been in progress for a few months. It seemed for much of that time that I might never find a resolution for these pieces, so that they could take their place as part of my Elegy for the end of an empire series. However I persevered, stopped being precious the parts of these not-quite-right paintings that I liked and managed to make them work.
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| By a thousand cuts Mixed media on panel, 30x30cm / 12x12in |
Some of the details that are already in place are three exhibitions that will be including my paintings throughout the month of January. As I have already mentioned, I currently have two pieces on show in the Snowflake Salon biennial in Philadelphia and one in the prestigious RSA Open 2012 in Edinburgh. Added to this, soon, will be six pieces in Edinburgh's Union Gallery. Their new exhibition, It's The Little Things, begins this Thursday, with the opening from 6-8pm. Sadly I won't be able to get along to the opening, as I will be 4,300 miles away, once again visiting Fayetteville, Arkansas!
My flight there leaves in a little less than 60 hours. As you might imagine, I have a lot of preparing to do for my trip and so I will bid you adieu now and be back here in a week time, a long way from here! Adieu!
Monday, 31 December 2012
Flying high
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| World apart at Union Gallery |
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| One wall of A place called home |
Following my trip to Arkansas, I immersed myself in the politics of Scotland's quest for independence and began a long body of work, Elegy for the End of an Empire. Taking cues from the work preceding it, my paintings began to get darker and more dynamic. The series is ongoing and I hope to pick up were I left it later in the year, as the independence debate hots up.
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| 'When we float' at the RSA |
This is just a snippet of my year in art. Over it, there have been many ups and many downs and a lot of hard work. In a week's time, I'll be heading back to Arkansas. After all of the hard work, I think it might be time to take a little break!
Thank you everyone who has supported me over the year. I would not have reached this stage without you!
Saturday, 22 December 2012
I feel fine
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| Mirk ceety sax, originally uploaded by stewartbremner |
However, rather than dwell on what has not happened, instead here is what has being going on in the time when I've not been in the studio. Firstly, I've been getting reacquainted with analogue photography, shooting rolls of film and developing them in my kitchen sink. You can see the results in the video below. After that is a little something I wrote this morning.
I feel fine
He is lying, half asleep in bed, when the sound wakes him. It is sudden and large and unexpected and shocks him into full wakefulness. His heart races. The window of his bedroom was rattled and there was a pulse through the the whole flat. The sound was as if a skip was dropped, breaking its chains and falling to the ground a few streets away, a full, metallic-edged 'tum'.
With open eyes he looks about his dimly-lit winter bedroom, while his heart slows down again. He is warm in his bed, several blankets and a few jumpers giving more insulation that his duvet alone. Did he imagine that sound, he wonders, was it some kind of hang over from a night of fitful sleep, of strange awakenings and twisted bed clothes? Pondering this, he gradually becomes aware of the slow decrease in the sounds of the city that his flat swims within.
The traffic sounds like it has ceased, its constant white noise gone as if it were the middle of the night. So too he can hear less sounds from his building. This further oddness gives him pause to wonder and he decides to risk a venture through the cold air to the window, to look out into the morning.
Outside, everything looks normal except the sky. The sky is gone. He has seen something a little like this before, often times when clouds blanket his city for days on end, reducing the sky to a monotone. This is something else again and a real shock. The sky is white, with not any tone at all, not even the slightest shadow. It is simply empty, a softly-glowing white void, neither warm nor cold, just white.
It is like a door opens in his mind. A dim and overlooked portal that seemingly has been within him always and yet until this moment had been overlooked, as if to focus on it were the equivalent of trying to grasp the last sliver of soap in a long and hot bath. And now it opens and knowledge slowly pours out.
He opens the curtains fully, crosses the room and gets back into his still-warm bed. So this is it, he realises, and he feels an acceptance that borders on joy. The REM song he had listened to the day before with something akin to irony comes back to him and repeats and repeats in his inner ear.
And I feel fine, he thinks.
From where he lies, he can see a few other tenements, dark and damp stone, that is oddly shadowless under the all-encompassing soft white glow. He catches in his peripheral vision a bright flash of pure light from one window and he knows, knowledge no doubt from that same unexpected stream, that someone has moved on and that he has only to wait for his turn and he will too.
It is comforting knowledge. There is nothing to fear here, he realises. This is the end and he has accepted it more easily than seems likely. In many ways, it is a relief – his fight is over and now he is simply waiting his turn, waiting for his flash of light.
The universal consciousness and 'we are all one', those appealing ideas that might be grasped intellectually yet as an island were always instinctually difficult, have come to pass. It all seems so obvious now. His loved ones, family and friends, all the people he has ever known, quite literally everyone, is returning to whence they came, to that single all-encompassing origin.
Further knowledge comes to him now. "Ye canny take it wi' ye," that phrase so often spoken about the dead. Here now is the point when everyone comes to understand that idea, to realise the utter finality of that statement. All the worldly possessions, all the accumulations of power no longer matter. If there is a judgement here, and while he knows there is not, at the same time he doubts all will share that belief, if there is a judgement here, it is that everyone is, unequivocally, equal.
For so many, the realisation dawns about the utter futility of years spent accumulating wealth and power and in those minds, acceptance and joy gain no foothold against hatred, terror, disbelief. So many people out there must be questioning their lives at this very moment, he thinks. At the same time, he thinks, the majority might be feeling that this is their reward for enduring and that the religious will perhaps be savouring their judgement days, valhallas, armageddons and raptures.
Back in his room, he is on his own and in the silent morning feels only a long-sought peace. He thinks back to his childhood, to the dark spectre of nuclear holocaust that haunted it, to the months, if not years, of nightmares and interrupted sleep and to that desperate desire to be near his mum and his sister at the end, when the bomb dropped, to not be separated and alone. A fear that when all the way back to his youngest days, when he first learned of death and dreamed of his mum, dad and sister all dying at once and drifting away into the sky on a big bed.
That desire not to be alone at a time of crisis, that quintessentially human need for companionship, has been washed away on this final morning, cleansed from his mind. He realises, in fact, that he is not alone and that where he is going, everyone will be together, every spark of life that has driven humanity will be reunited. While there is a diminishment in that final embrace of those things that make him specifically him, at the same time he knows that 'he' will not be lost, not entirely, that those identifiers that form part of who he is are eternal.
He closes his eyes for a moment, to breath. When he opens them the flash of light whites out the entire world.
And when he opens his eyes again, the morning is dim, barely passing enough light around his curtains to let him see the room. It sounds like it is raining outside. His stomach is empty and rumbling and there is a burning tension across his shoulders and up into his neck, which feels chilly outside the heap of blankets on his bed. He wonders again what that strange noise was and it if truly happened and then, with a sigh that feels like it came from decades hence, he swings his legs from out of the covers and reaches for some clothes.
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Philadelphia, Fayetteville, Edinburgh
This week, I was invited to show at an exhibition in Philadelphia, PA! I submitted two of my Post Process paper paintings and they will soon be winging their way there, across the United States from Fayetteville, AR, where they were last seen in public. This will make for the third state of that union where I will have shown work, not to mention that it is the first major city!
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| You know your problems ain't exactly new Mixed media on paper, 16x24cm |
Next week sees both the second East Prospect exhibition in Fayetteville, Arkansas and the Out of the Blue Art Market in Edinburgh, Scotland. The East Prospect show looks like it is going to be very exciting indeed and I truly wish that I could be there. Sadly, that won't be possible. I will, however, be at the Art Market and am very much looking forward to that. It is going to be a very busy week of planning for these two shows!Friday, 23 November 2012
Something for the holidays
My painting 'When we float' is on the wall immediately opposite the entrance to the exhibition, which is on the lower ground floor galleries. I'm really pleased with how it looks under proper gallery light, the reds and oranges in particular really pop.
RSA Lower Galleries
The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL
24 November – 31 January, Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 12-5pm
Closed 25 & 26 December, open New Year's Day 12-5pm
The market runs from 11am-5pm, with a good variety of art and crafts, all being sold by their makers. The Drill Hall's café is also open during these times, selling tasty treats.
The exhibition is open for two dates: Thursday 6 December 5-8pm and Saturday 8 December 11am-4pm. Sadly I will be unable to attend, although given that matter transporters still cease to exist, that is hardly a surprise, given the Art Market finishes precisely when the second day of the East Prospect show opens! I really wish I could be there because the exhibition looks like it is going to be a really exciting. If you're in Northwest Arkansas, you really don't want to miss it!
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