Creative Impatience

Since I am a self-taught artist, I sometimes fall into the trap of trying to validate my practice through more training. In my first year of painting, I thought I wouldn't be taken seriously by galleries unless I had a formal qualification and therefore enrolled at London Fine Art Studios, to study art using the grisaille method. I chose this atelier rather than an art school or university as I didn't want to develop concept as much as learn the nuts and bolts of the craft. I also didn't have three years to spare as I was already in my late forties.

I spent the first day drawing a block in charcoal. A whole day. One block. The teacher would come and correct our proportions and values. Each student was allowed to progress according to their accuracy. I was about in the middle of the class, there being some disconnect between my eyes and hand, but above all, a huge lack of patience.

I was already painting at least three works a week in my home studio; quick, hurried and excited pieces with lots of colour, the antithesis of what we were doing in London. As the weeks went on, I eventually moved up to a female torso and faceted male head. To truly see what is there, not what you think is there is what the training was all about. To clarify, I did not want to create portraiture or realism once I had finished the course. I only wanted to paint abstracts. It was that I thought I needed to show that I could paint in a fine art way and that would make more abstraction technique valid, like a jazz piano player who trained at a conservatoire and now was free to break the rules he'd learned. It was a false premise for me personally, as I soon saw the effect on the abstract art I was producing, which became tight and worried.

One of my early attempts at finding the shadow shapes at London Fine Art Studios - the rhombus shape and stripes on the middle are a correction from the teacher

I left my art training. It was a massive commute and not really what I wanted to do. I just wanted to express myself, not even knowing yet about the expressivist movement. (Expressionism began in Germany in 1905.) I've come to understand something about these sweeping movements and how they effect the nervous system in a positive and healing way and so it is the execution of these paintings which has been vital to me.

I recently spent the day with a fine artist, so that I could paint alongside her in the traditional method. I thought I'd hit a plateau in my work and so reverted once more to thinking the issue was lack of training. However, by the end of the day, all I felt was frustration. It was the process itself of this kind of painting, stopping, looking, SO much looking, using small brushes, working in detail which left me with a headache. And the end product was not what I would want hanging on my wall. There was a sense of stagnation in it. I went home and roughed up the painting, which is the one at the top of this post, called 'Odd Cloud Formations'. Once I'd broken the structure down, I stood back and thought yes, that's better. This is not to say that I don't love fine art, I really do! I am just not made in a way that can make it or wants to make it.

I was the same even with my writing practice. I have a Masters in Creative Writing and achieved a distinction I think partly because of my impatience for form and highly fragmented/deconstructed style. For my final dissertation, I wrote a piece which had the narrative working backwards and forwards, so the time met in the middle and every other section used an element or object to personify another character or clue to the mystery of the story. I wonder if it is experimentation itself which is so pleasing to me.

The more I abandon the label 'artist', the easier I find it to create. And the less I compare myself to those at the top of the field, the more I can love my practice and let it develop into whatever it wants to be. It might be strange to say but I don't paint with my eyes. I paint a movement of energy I'm feeling and the brush is an extension of that. If there is any kind of seeing going on at all, it is whether the mood of a piece matches something within me. Coming to art so late in life in an oddity (like my anomalous clouds above) and also adds to the need to press on. I'm fifty-four and want to be in the centre of whatever I'm doing now, not in ten years time. There is a place for my 'impatience' both within individual works and for my whole practice. I've learned that it isn't so much that I'm impatient but more than I like to work on a large scale, in broad strokes and dislike fine detail. Where there is detail in my work, it has come through the disjuncture of the layers, for example, fracturing a layer beneath by pouring mineral essence over it and agitating the whole painting. I am happy to create multiple layers and work continuously on a piece but there must be a lot of movement (I never sit to paint).

Although this post is about the perception of impatience, it's about revising my understanding of what I'm doing. On review, it is not so much impatience, which has a negative connotation. I spend most of my time in the art studio and this takes patience. However, there is a creative impetus, an urgency in the way I paint, or write or do most things. I am not someone who would do well with Tai Chi. We are all so uniquely made and I love this about us humans. I also don't want to categorise what I'm doing so much, as it might change in the future but what I do realise here and now that the sort of impatience I have has been repurposed as dynamic expressivism. The language I'm using about myself needs to change. Perhaps you criticise yourself for being X or Y, but perhaps that's just the flip side of a beautiful and creative trait when given the right conditions to flourish.

#artpractice #studiolife #artlife #impatience #oilpainter #diaryofanartist