My partner sent me this quote, and man it sums up how I roll.
Or try to roll.
It certainly sums up my focus for 2022.
By nature, I'm fairly chaotic. The wild and raw and pure-feeling runs strong in me. It's a great characteristic. One of my strengths. It's where my talent resides, in that chaotic beautiful place of instinct and feeling. But when I was younger, I was all chaos and no order, and it made me constantly feel as if I were swimming in a rough sea, unable to get to shore. It was exhausting.
When I was about 22, I wrote a line, "wild on solid ground".
In retrospect, I think that's what the work of the last thirty-something years has been about: getting my self onto solid ground so that I can really let go, both in terms of work and in my personal life.
To be ordinary, to be normal. I wanted that so badly.
To live a personal life of calm and quiet, with periods of marvellous joy along with the inevitable sharp jolts of pain.
To garden and take walks
and do the dishes
and talk long talks with my partner.
To kiss and make love and let go.
I have that with John.
I finally am on the solid ground of my internal self. [The only ground that really matters].
In my work, I've spent long years focussing on the difficult task [for me, a monumental task] of creating structure and order in my business and artistic processes, with the express purpose of that very structure and order providing me as an artist the time and space to step into the painting studio and make marks however I goddamn want to, with no regard to anyone or anything else. To go into the studio for long hours and paint the marks I wanna. Draw like a child half the time, and feel bloody gleeful about it. Use colour just because it feels right. Make marks that feel naughty and wrong and not "good art" and absolutely love it. Then of course there's the drawing and photographing and the word-writing... just creating words and image and environments because it expresses something in me. Yeah, it's a dream, longheld. And I finally get to live it.
Having Jane my studio manager for the last year and a half has helped me in a way I can't even measure really. She is by nature ordered, and I've learnt so much from her. Together, we have finally shaped the business end of the FW Studio into something I am so proud of, which not only provides a healthy income for us both, it is a place where I am beginning to really flourish artistically. It's been thirty two years in the making, but it took Jane to really make it work. It's the work partnership I always wanted, and most definitely always needed. But I had to do the hard yards alone first, all those years of doing it all myself, so that I was strong in my own self and path before working with someone else.
And now, on the 12th January 2022, I feel I'm really ready do the Flaubert, to be violent and original in my work. Violent in terms of the radical honesty artist such as Tracey Emin have nailed for so long. Original in terms of saying something real and true and mine. Of course, it may take another thirty years to get there, but hey, I'm so up for the ride! Every life and every artistic career is simply made up of one step in front of the other, one day after the next making work that has meaning for you, in the hope that it has meaning for someone else.
Now all that's required is to have the courage to begin, to ensure the time I've finally carved out to make the work is treated as sacred. To not let the mechanics of life and business get in the way of that one day a week I get to do what the fck I like. To get into that studio, to be gloriously alone and make those marks, to write and photograph and draw with the glee and abandon of a small child. Yeah man, I see more stick figures in my future...
2022. Bring it on. God I'm happy to be back at work.
