Josephine The Singer, A Man in Pyjamas, And Walking With a White Cane

When I came across the story by Franz Kafka of Josephine the Singer, it was one of the most joyful LMFAO moments. I felt as if I had been included in an intimate way with the insane humour,  but kindly mocking voice of the universe and that was a relief. If you don’t know the story it is a short story about the artist and her audience. From Wikipedia...

Josephine is a rarity among the mouse people, for she has the innate ability to sing, which none other in the community has displayed. She can not only sing, but she can sing beautifully, helping all the mouse people tolerate their unusually hardworking lives. Some of the mouse people claim to dislike her and do not believe she is truly singing, while others adore her and consider her a communal treasure; regardless, all the mouse people gather round to listen to her, and once she is singing, forget their reservations about her; they use her feeble vocal cords to their utmost strength, and treasure her delicacy
.

^{As a Josephine, I know her well, as she mounts her little pedestal and sings in her reedy little voice. My existence is as of little consequence as a treasured member of a short lived mouse colony, but the rest of the parallels are snortingly funny if you let them be.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_the_Singer,_or_the_Mouse_Folk}

 

^{Many years ago my beloved was under a great deal of stress and I was woken by his restless dreaming in the middle of the night. He was laughing out loud in his sleep and intrigued I asked him in the morning about his dream. He said he was walking a tightrope in his pyjamas, and quite ridiculously used a gun to shoot the  end of the tightrope loose so that he no longer had to worry about walking along it. It marked a turning point in our lives and is an image I will treasure.}

^{The universe sends us many images to short circuit a crisis and to help us to see the world in a new way. I have always used a Zen technique for problem solving, of throwing the whole kit and caboodle up in the air and wishing for the things I want most to be the ones that land. This week I have been thrown a wobbly one with an eye problem that has thrown my world out of balance (and in extremes of imagination has reduced my eyesight to walking with a cane.) A trifle melodramatic I know, but looking through a dodgy lense this week my worldview has greatly changed.}

^{I live in car dominated world from which I have been excluded this week. I see myself as an artist but without my eyes, can I still be one and without my eyes can I still lip read to be part of the conversation? My peripheral vision has been affected and since I have always been a big picture type of person physically my view of the world has been narrowed down to my immediate and selfish ones so how do I maintain my intellectual persona? Is this what has happened to Australia? We have become dizzy from staring in panic at our immense borders and have become sun blind so need to now just tend to our own selfish little needs?}

^{I will stand here and sing in my croaky little crackle “We are a part of everything and everything we do impacts everything else because that’s what the universe has shared with me this week.” You can put it to any tune you please.}

 

 

 

Manifesting and Incubation

In the life of an artist there is no one direct line of work to follow. It is difficult to know how a day will pan out unless you are actually involved in a project. The difficult time is in generating a project especially when responding in an emotional way to background noise.

It is important therefore to be able to surface from the miasma of idleness with a clear plan for forward motion. When an artist is involved in a project it is as if that is the only thing on earth that they were put here to do and optimism levels can rise to an unsubstantiated level. The ebb tide can be  daunting but it is also important to recognise that ebb and flow are a normal part of an artist’s way of being and to work with that.

 

When studying ceramics one bright mentor said that it is important to just go into the studio and work as if that is what you always do because the work of an artist is what generates the next project. It is also important to ask yourself what it is you want. You need a clear visualisation of where you want to be and want you to produce and  where you want this work to appear in order for it to manifest.You cannot plan if you do not have a big picture idea of where you want to be. BTW Has anyone heard a big picture idea from any of our pollies about where we are going to be anytime soon?

A few quick scribble reasons for being an artist. I am sure you can make the list much longer!

Can’t help myself. It comes out of me like breath.

Want to be famous

Want to make money

Want to save the world

Want to be remembered

Want to have a conversation. My way of being a part of something.

Therapy to help myself.

 

While it is nicer to have the conversation with others, sometimes you just need to sit and have an imaginary conversation with yourself to ask the questions. When you hear the answer then it is a matter of following some logical pathways to achieving that outcome. Sometimes the answer directs you away from the process you have been following because it is not a logical conclusion. e.g I want to make money- does art make money? Not frequently and not much. So was the original answer naive or dishonest?

Some practical things that you can pursue when you fall into the pit of doom are

1:to seek challenges to stimulate your imagination-competitions etc

2: repetitive exercises to perfect a skill

3: market research

4: choose another area of interest to focus on for a set period of time thereby giving yourself permission to step away without guilt.

5: play with your existing work, mixing it around, displaying it differently to perhaps stimulate a new idea. Imagine curating just a small fraction of your work

6: try something as exactly opposite to what you are doing as is possible eg try to make something really ugly and clumsy

7: experiment with the same idea or object in a completely different material or several different materials

8: ask people in to look and comment.

9: respond to an existing problem eg too many throw away containers, rising obesity levels, limited modern storage.

10: random dictionary slam- two unrelated words picked at random and brainstorm ideas these two words generate.

Never throw away ideas. Keep a book or scrap pile or pinboard and file them. Sometimes your ideas collection drawn in your own hand may become collectable but when dipped into occasionally can feed more ideas. These ideas percolate through your brain the more often you flick through them in a relaxed manner and when left to incubate can suddenly erupt when another random idea rubs up against them.

Pinterest is fun but unless you follow up straight from Pinterest into your own scribbled ideas you are just wasting time. Pinterest adds to your sense of futility, and envy especially if you are collecting directly from other people’s design and art pages. It also becomes a lazy way of filling you up full of other people’s stuff so that you no longer know where the real you is.

Try  instead to only pinch a part of an idea or image using a tool such as snip  (widget not showing!)and play with this little snippet. Steal another artists colour palette or a colour palette for interiors to give your work a contemporary look. I have been obsessing for a few years over Cy Twombly’s paintings and can endlessly amuse myself with snippets of his paintings embellished with my own work to create wishful ideas.

 

Try stealing objects from still life paintings, Margaret Olley has a zillion of them and I think Gwynn Hansen Piggot has given Morandi a good going over.

Stir your stumps and get making or drawing or doing whatever it is that makes you an artist! We will know the fate of the election cycle in a couple of days and life will continue for better or worse.

 

 

 

Stephen Benwell and Cerebral Accretions

I have had a little break in my writing to accommodate some other cerebral activity. Our bodies don’t grow evenly but a little bit on one side and a little bit on the other so at some stage we might be in sync but at many times we are striving for that balance.

My mind has had to take on some new learnings, of the IT kind because my regular band of clever helpers were not available at the precise moments of my crises. It meant I had to nut things out alone and that was a good thing because I now know how to use some new applications and with more practice I will look experienced by comparison. It took me longer than a digital native but I am happy to say my mind is still able to take on new things which means my mind grows a little more on one side or other and that is a good thing.

When hand building with clay especially fine porcelain, it is a matter of constantly adding even weights and thicknesses of clay and giving the clay time to consolidate before adding another piece just like adding new learnings to a brain. An expert in this field is Stephen Benwell who is exhibiting at Heide Gallery. http://www.heide.com.au/exhibitions/future/exhibition/stephen-benwell-beauty-anarchy-desire-a-retrospective/edate/2013-08-08/eid/448

His forms are outrageously large and finely built and a mystery of construction if you have ever tried it yourself.

His earlier works are quite muted colours because of the clay he used and the fact that in Australia in the seventies there was not much advice about firing coloured work which he discovered was better in an oxidation firing than reduction. I made the same mistakes at the beginning of my course. In those days he decorated with geometric forms on quite classical shapes. There are legs and feet on many vessels and at one stage he goes through quite a zoomorphic phase based on Pre Columbian figures. You will have to visit the exhibition to see those forms because my camera hiccupped at that point.

Here is one with feet though.

 

 

 

Being a pioneer of a form is a hard road to hoe but it is also free of rules and Stephen Benwell has used that lack of guidelines to his advantage. He has learned like a child whose default mode is to always be a learner and discoverer. Firing stoneware to earthenware temperatures and firing pieces up to 30 times to see what happens is a true adventurer's spirit. He is so closely involved with the clay but at the same time detaches himself from the object by exposing it to a gamble.
As he acquired more understanding of clay and firing and how glazes work in different firings his colours gradually come to life. The stiffness of his forms loosens and the surface also loosens and sings with colour and texture. The white surfaces become canvasses for luscious colour while the classic influence is directed more at the imagery on the vessels in repetition of classical tiled Roman walls.

Eventually the sketches of forms on the surface metamorphose into the actual figures without the vessels and have the quality almost of porridge which he accomplishes with layers of slip and glaze over the already slipped and glazed surface with just hints and smudges of the underglazed colour showing through the misty surface. A kinder way to describe them is to say that they are made of cloud material but if I said that I would feel pangs of jealousy because that is what I have always wanted to achieve! A couple of the pieces worked this way remind me of Cy Twombly paintings.

 

While viewing this exhibition someone asked me how one person can make a figure out of clay and for it to be a success and yet another person cannot. My answer in Stephen Benwell’s case is by adding a touch of tenderness. It reminds me of the old Milton the Monster song where the mad professor adds” just a tincture  of tenderness ..but not too much” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gJAm1BA6Fg

 

 

The expressions drawn out  in the facial expressions or bodily gestures have a magical quality that can only be put there by transferring a bit of one’s own soul into the creation. Many years ago I interviewed Melbourne naive artist Anne Marie Graham and she not only kindly tolerated the presence of my four children in her tiny apartment but she directed half of the interview to them in order to pass on her secrets. One of the most important gems was that no matter what you are painting or creating whether it be a rock or a bird, you need to inhabit that thing for that moment of creation, so that if you are a rock you know its heaviness on the earth and its drape of muscles and if you are a bird you know the flightiness of its perch. When you work like that you leave a part of yourself in the work. Stephen Benwell’s works breathe with a part of him.