Some little things - isolate and exaggerate

Another idea i had for the kids, something which i thought might be cool to teach children about, is like a mini modern art class. Teaching 7 year olds about Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Duchamp, or get them to recite some Dadaist poems.., that would be so fantastic to see how they responded to it, and whether they could come up with their own work in that same vein. I suspect they wouldn't view it as transgressive in any way at all, they'd probably just come at it with confidence, like with everything else they attempt.

....

Anyway.

I was stuck on monday, i really wasn't quite sure what to do, like every monday, but worse. Then tuesday came, and i still wasn't any clearer, so i figured maybe it was because i had only two huge canvases in front of me, big canvases, that means whatever is put on there becomes a big statement. You go to all that trouble to paint something big and people expect it to be more meaningful than something just drawn on the back of an envelope. So i thought maybe that's what was holding me back, so i went to BandQ and got me a sheet of hardboard for £2, cut it into 8 squares and started painting. It worked really well too, above are the 6 i've done so far. Just little things, as if a fly has passed by and saw these little objects bestowed with such epic ideas and beauty. It's really helped, and it really is about attitude, that's what causes you to make good things or not. To 'isolate and exaggerate' is mine at the moment. That's the way i'm trying to view things, to take an object or a person, and almost caricaturely, but not quite, paint them, filling them out to the corners of the canvases. Making them big and bold and colourful. Exaggerating poses and lines and colours, making small things epic.

And i think, in no small part, this positive turn in my work has been influenced by the teaching. It's useful having other things going on, which distract you, alongside time when you focus on painting. Last year in manchester i was working at a library, and had a few clubs i was going too, and i was getting drunk a couple of nights a week too, that was distraction enough. This year i have the teaching, the scraping out the pigeon trailer, and things the job centre has been throwing at me, but i won't have that for much longer, will have to give it up. So.. it's all good.

Also, read this Consolations of Philosophy by De Botton, it's really good, have loaned out Montaigne's Essays ( a mammoth book) from the library. But occasionally he introduces images. Not just alongside the writing, but instead of. An example:

"..It is because love directs us with such force towards the second of the will-to-life's two great commands that Schopenhauer judged it the most inevitable and understandable of our obsessions.

5. The fact that the continuation of the species is seldom in our minds when we ask for a phone number is no objection to the theory..."

He gives us the task of collecting the dots, he doesn't spell it, makes us work a little more. Which, though this is probably a primitive way of using pictures and words as one language, it's sort of exciting (though i'm easily excitable..). It's been done before, i've seen some W.G.Sebald books that use pictures, and Christian Boltanski's Sterblich is a book that uses only images, but in a wordy like way.

Comics would be the obvious point of reference, but in most i've read the words and images are treated as two seperate parts, two different languages, rather than trying to combine the two.