What is the greatest reward you get from doing your work?
When I sit down to create a work it is the only time I can experience a sense of mindfulness. I find this incredibly rewarding as instead of being mentally elsewhere, I am able to switch off all the thoughts in my mind and enter a meditative state by being in the present moment. All that matters is the canvas in front of me and I am acutely aware of each mark I place on it.
I love the sense of achievement and purpose I have after the work is completed, and the energy received from people responding to it. I find people are becoming more conscious and appreciative of hand-made work as we become engulfed by mass produced objects.
In your opinion, what does it mean to be a successful artist?
Apart from commercial success― for all the boring reasons of needing money to keep producing any art―it has to be the ability to accept that to be successful you are going to need to be innovative, dedicated and great at juggling all the minutiae. Being an artist you need stints of unbroken time to create and in order to be productive you have to sacrifice some areas of your life. You can spend hours overwhelmed by what you can’t achieve. Patti Smith puts it so well, “… it all just seems endless. But you could sit all day paralysed by what you can’t do. We are all captains of our little boats and I don’t want to use the world’s problems as an excuse not to do my work.”
The idea that to be a successful artist you have to live some kind of tortured existence doesn’t sit well with me. It is fine to produce works that people will want to buy, and that are playful, as well as works that make them suffer. I think we have a capacity to use our creativity to improve the human condition and to bring joy to those seeing our artwork. I recently read Lucian Freud’s comment on Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, “It’s okay, it’s clever, but after you’ve seen it once, there’s not much to come back to.”
What experience, good or bad, has taught you the most as an artist?
I can clearly remember a sculpture class in my first year of Fine Arts at Uni. that changed my way of thinking forever. We were all sitting around putting together our “pieces”―which was the great thing about sculpture―anything could be a “piece” if you looked at it long enough. Behind us, a group of third years were dissecting a recent show:
“I cannot believe they took my piece out of the exhibition!” said the outraged student.
I know! I can’t believe they didn’t get the whole concept of rotting meat and the decay of our bodies as we consume it” said the equally outraged friend.
Apparently, he had enclosed a kilo of sausages in a perspex box for the end-of-year two week summer exhibition. Three days of forty degree heat and the artwork had to be removed because people had started to vomit on entry.
So I guess it made me think, don’t take it all too seriously. And also, if your work is making people throw up it may be worthwhile rethinking your medium.
0 comments:
Post a Comment