These white walls

A mix of a murky blue and grey paint has finally hit the paper. I have broken the spell of endless white and made a mark. Getting into the routine of mark making is like waving a ride of highs and lows.

Moments in the week exist where it all seems futile. Where I feel as if I don’t really have the skills to keep making art and wonder why it is I was selected to study here in the first place? The self-doubt seems to come more easily than the normative motion of drawing and painting. And I wonder how I will leave this crippling emotional deluge and find the place where the making of the art once filled me up so completely that I barely remembered time.

It has been a hard week. Many of my fellow students have felt the pressure of having to ready works for documentation. Our graduate show takes place in November and whilst it is only August there are deadlines that need to be met if the respective catalogue is ready on time. Each student’s work has to be photographed and the jpeg images need to be sent to the design team by the end of the week.

It seems as if we are part of a machine, in which things have to take place before they are ready. Before the work is truly made. But it is the nature of the beast and we have all doubted that what we are photographing truly represents the breadth and depth of the work we have made at school. And it is in this doubting that it seems we have begun to doubt ourselves.

Sitting outside in the cold, needing to take in light and air, I tell one of the girls that it just feels like I am not an artist. That it just feels as if I have nothing left to give.

‘It’s a cycle’ she tells me ‘the feeling will come and go, apparently everybody has it happen to them. It is part of what it means to be creative. I wouldn’t beat your self up about it, the inspiration isn’t constant and art is so psychological anyway. You put yourself through such a process envisioning the work and then pulling it out of you into the physical that in can be quite traumatic at times’

And she is right: There are days when you feel as if you are dragging yourself into the studio and other days when you wonder, why you could have ever wanted to stay away. This week was a lagging one, and I forced myself to keep going: To keep putting the work up because it had to be photographed. I found myself working in a focused way, which didn’t except taking a step backwards or stopping.

You see I have created all these small drawings on a5 paper that can be linked together by connecting the lines. This creates a large-scale drawing that moves though space. All I had to do this week was stick the a5 drawings on the wall and decide the best way to connect them. It all sounded so simple just find the line that matches the next one and connect it. Just like a dot-to-dot painting.

Instead it was as if I was working in a deliberate action but without a resolved understanding. All the drawings went up but in a mish mash fashion that made the installation look like a giant mess. I realised I lacked a framework, that I could suggest the framework was Situationist and/or spontaneous and that whatever came out in that moment was the way it was going to be. But in truth I wasn’t happy with the outcome. And it made me think that I needed a clearer idea on how the work should be assembled.

Working out how to put things together seems easy but it is a difficult task when you loose hope and sight of the fact that you do have the skills to do it. So this week I have set myself a new task, to look at the way other artists use composition when collage-ing or combining tiny drawing works to make a big one.

Perhaps I will find a pattern that suits, or perhaps I will find a photograph that calls to me. Perhaps somewhere in my research I will find the inspiration that will call me back to the place where I make art because it fills the holes in myself that becomes wider when I am not making art. And perhaps I can find the place where I am submerged in the thinking and making and get to a point where there is excitement and energy in the placement of layered small paintings.