New Years Resolutions -Getting Motivated

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How do you motivate yourself, especially when the work’s not selling and no-one is remotely interested in it? You really have to keep showing up at the studio every day – at the very least to keep your work developing.

I paint very slowly and, if I thought about how long it would take to finish the painting sitting there in front of me, I’m not sure that I’d ever get started.
One thing I do to kick-start the session is to concentrate on just one small part of the painting, say a person with a scarf on – if nothing else, at least at the end of the day I can look at it and think what a cracking scarf I’ve just done there…

Generally I do hope to achieve a bit more than that but it does help me get going. And just the physical process of putting paint to canvas seems to do the trick and the ideas then start coming.
Or to put it another way – motivation follows action, not the other way around. Sitting around waiting for that one great idea means you don’t get much else done in the meantime.

As Chuck Close says “Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work”

The Balance of Power

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Carol Nunan raised an interesting question on her blog – what makes a good gallery? Well I know what makes a bad one……

The other day a gallery called me, urgently requesting more work. The problem was that they hadn’t paid me at that point for more than six months of sales – and this from a gallery who can only pay their artists quarterly because of their ‘accounts system’. It helped that in this case I knew that they had sold at least some work as they were asking for replacements of pieces I had already sent to them.

So I have to say that I came over all militant and told them I wouldn’t provide the gallery with any more work until I received a cheque – which duly arrived.

A lot of my colleagues seem to feel that galleries will pay when they are ready to and there’s not a lot we can do. After all, we don’t always get to know if and when the work has sold (until they ring up for more, that is). And I have to admit that this gallery sells very well for me so I wouldn’t be keen to rock that particular boat…..

And I know how hard it is to be assertive when few of us have any financial security , let alone savings, pensions, etc., so the balance of power has always seemed heavily weighted in favour of the galleries (although less so these days, as lots of artists now sell directly to their customers through their websites and of course there are all those art fairs which were unheard of a decade ago…..but that’s another story ).

And don’t get me started on the supplying of artwork on a sale or return basis that most galleries like to operate from – the least you’d expect from that arrangement is that they’d have the courtesy to pay their artists on time…

Oh dear, I do seem to have come over all bitter and Scrooge-like – it must be that time of year.

Happy Christmas!

Cutting the Blocks

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Somehow, I can find a lot to interest me when I’m cutting my printing blocks – for instance, delicate little curls of lino appear from the thin lines on a skyscraper and great thick wedges from clearing large areas like the sky. It’s really quite….. ok, I admit it, things have been a bit slow today.

Printmaking Today

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I am featured in the current issue of Printmaking Today, a quarterly magazine which includes articles on printmaking techniques and materials and reviews of exhibitions and workshops.
My article is titled Urban Theatre and is part of the long-running series called Artist’s Eye. In it I discuss my growing interest in the people that occupy my urban landscapes – unmissable!