I often come across the idea that 'real artists' are 'so talented' that they can just draw stuff, like, brilliantly. It's there within them, they were born with that capacity. There's a closely linked idea that what artists make comes from some secret place of genius within them; some source of originality and differentness that's not given to ordinary people.
As a basically unschooled person, I absorbed this idea from the culture around me, unconsciously. I knew I wanted to draw and paint, but when I got to St Martins School of Art in the late 70s, I was told that drawing from life was reactionary, old hat, conventional, stuck in the past. So I dutifully made my way to the abstract room, and lined my 18 year old self up with a bunch of other youthful furrowed brows, working studiously on canvases that had to be a minimum of six foot wide. I waited for the stuff to start pouring from me, like it was supposed to. Didnae happen. I decided that if something was supposed to pour out of me, perhaps first it needed to pour into me, arranged a year off, and went off to Oman to become a disc jockey. Travelled the length of India by train, dropped in to Burma, sweated in Hong Kong, visited the art treasures of China in Taipei. In fact, the pouring in lasted for the next thirty years, and even when I properly started painting again my unconscious still had to trick me to get me past the idea that when the time was right the pouring out would simply just begin.
What I didn't know then was that, in fact, if you go into pretty much any artist's studio, you will see images that didn't come from them at all, all over their walls; torn off, cut out random images; photos and postcards; images made by old masters, designers, other artists. No-one ever explained to me that artists work, and they feed. They draw and paint and copy and design, experiment and practice, for years and decades (in fact anyone could do this, but most people simply don't, and then they complain that their drawing 'looks like a six year old's'....). Artists feed off colours and textures and shapes in the world, including the work of other artists, past and present. As Austin Kleon puts it, they steal; voraciously, from everywhere. They notice what they're drawn to, they collect, and then they respond.
'You only speak because you want to react to something you've heard. The idea of an actor going away to their room and rehearsing something alone is an absolute nonsense to me. What you have to say is completely incidental. All I want to see from the actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening. And then what you have to say will be automatic and then it will become free and alive. And then you can work on it and shape it and talk about it. But the basic kind of engine to it is how accurate is your listening. And how alive are you to your fellow actors and how accurate your response, and how bold.'
Alan Rickman, interview on Instagram
Sometimes, my inherited cultural voices start to whisper 'But aren't you just being derivative? Why are you using the work of ancient artists in your paintings, why are you just copying stuff, instead of giving us your own original ideas?'
I'll tell you why. Because I'm having a conversation. I'm not interested in 'expressing myself, or creating a style, or working out what people might want to have on their walls. I'm always on the lookout for someone to have a visual conversation with, whether that someone be the human who made a symbolic object in 3,000 BC, or a 1950s designer abstracting plants in their own unique way.
Working with the world, as it presents itself to me.
