“It is very easy to be different. It is very difficult to be better”.

-Jony Ive

I have often felt over the past academic year that painting or anything other than performance or installation work is passe or even redundant within CSM. We have discussed this at great length in the DCS and we all seem to believe that well presented, critically edited, considered art is the benchmark of quality and that painting, sculpture and drawing can be as exciting or dull as any other format of artwork. Sweeping disregard from my fellow students around ‘trad’ artwork and the online exhibition being hijacked and dominated by those working in performance has left me feeling as though painting, sculpture and drawing are peripheral in the context of the London Art School. I was told in the whatsapp group that a drawing artist and performance artist had no business exhibiting together in a group show or even on our instagram page and my suggestions were summarily dismissed. Much of the performance and installation work in the grad show was lost on me - overall some pretty poorly presented work with little to hang my hat on, with one foot in the pretentious camp and the other in the grindingly boring camp. Several of us left the show feeling a bit nauseous from the sensory assault and generally rather disappointed. Kindness yes, willing to compromise on the value of the art experience, no. I see that celebrating learning and experimentation is pushed at the expense of outcome at CSM but I question how it is that so little stood out as an interesting experience. Maybe it’s me.

The two artists of specific interest to me at the grad show were both painters: Emma Ferrer and Sarah Jane Hender. Both were painters but for me both presented their work well, gave the sense that it hadn’t been thrown together 24 hours before the deadline and demonstrated clear skill in the delicate balance between suggestion and ambiguity. There was a creative intelligence particularly to Sarah Jane Hender’s portraits, I felt, reminiscent of Alice Neel or Ishbel Myerscough - frank and not too polished. Admittedly, I speak ‘paint’ so maybe they were more accessible to me but I do believe there is something fundamental to the nature of the painting that makes it difficult to hide among the smoke and mirrors. I am not trying to argue that painting is better per se, more that it’s hard to get away with exhibiting really crap painting. I confess to never having really seen a video that has excited me or brought hot tears to my eyes, outside of art house cinema. I am committed to an open mind and I hope one day I see a video piece that stirs me to the soul.

In some ways the use of this MA has been in confirming what I already knew. I want to paint. I have enjoyed the past 9 months of gestating new ideas, experimenting with notions so far out of my comfort zone that I am honestly not sure how I got here. I am more open minded than I was. I am interested in making work I had never considered previously and I am deeply excited about the concepts I am nurturing that are finally sewing together all these various channels of thought. But ultimately, I just want to paint. I want to paint pictures, frame them and put them on a wall. I don’t know how my own grad show will go, it will probably be achingly lacking and I will have little choice but to continue to learn from my failures, but I really hope that after donkeys years of education I can come up with something semi decent. Remains to be seen, though.

I have been in the studio or painting in the garden almost every day since Summer cessation and it feels good. I am reading a lot and enjoying thinking about the Research Paper. I am so happy to feel peaceful in my work again after such a lot of transition. My work isn’t ground breaking but neither is any of the performance or installation work I am seeing. I hope to make honest work that I have devoted my life to nurturing and carefully tending. It’s nice to look up and find myself back where I started - not hugely different but a bit better. I look forward to completing some large works, which I am loosely considering to be ‘boneyards’. They are beautiful and ruined and they feel like me. I will continue to make paper in the meantime, that feels good too.

Boneyeards in progress