Week Thirteen | Beauty and Ruination
In this week’s zoom discussion Jonathan played a short clip of Ian MacGilchrist speaking about how the brain’s hemispheres are more than divisions of responsibility but that the application of left and right have implications for cultural, ethical and social decision making. Overreliance on a left dominant society leads to tendencies such as self interest over generosity. He spoke briefly of beauty and he had my attention. I have been preoccupied with the idea of anti-beauty in art and the discussion reared its (literally) ugly head once more. It occurs to me that I have a limiting belief that really good art has to be in some way, at least a bit, ugly.
This along with being rejected for another million open calls and submissions has meant I feel increasingly compelled to turn the volume down on the outside world, which I have done more and more in recent years but it is now clear to me I can completely mute all external noise and just make my work quietly in my studio with world cancelling headphones permanently on.
Drawing has been fantastic this week and I feel something has shifted. I haven’t made enough progress with my project for the low residency in March but I am OK with that as the ideas have been percolating in the background. I think I will aim to divide the 10m roll of paper into four and make separate works to avoid all the anxiety and dread around how to manoeuvre the full 10 metres as a single entity.
Ideas around ruination have also been ruminating and I have been reading around the subject of the aesthetics of the anthropocene. Concerns around context of art as an act of resistance have skulked in the back of my mind, avoiding eye contact with me, as I don’t have the answers although I know I don’t want to dye my hair blue and life prostrate across the M4. Increasingly the idea of art as an act of kindness makes sense to me, that no one wants to look at climate change, least of all if it’s ugly, scary and above all an exercise in blame and self loathing. There is just too much to feel bad about already. Giving the anticipatory grief around climate demise space to breathe and the kindness to see it as it is makes more sense to me than noisy acts of virtue signalling and traffic disruption. I hope these drawings of ruination give our landscapes a quiet voice of reason and love.
Drawing | Compressed Charcoal and Pencil on A4 Watercolour Paper
I noticed while jet washing the driveway that the marks made were interesting and might work well on my drawings. I spent a while until my feet were freezing (!) trying the idea out. It didn’t work on the oils but it did create some amazing effects on both landscape drawings and some heavily layered acrylic paintings I have been working on for several years. Some print making paper I had started some monotypes on fell apart but beautifully so when they are dry I may be able to salvage parts of them. I dismissed some previous ruination attempts because they became ‘too ruined’, but I have decided to keep an open mind to all stages in the ruination process.
Although there is a slight disconnect between the work I do in the studio - my ‘gallery work’ - and the drawings and more experimental work that I do at home, the themes are the same and they are leap frogging ideas, albeit in different ways. The above images show ways of experimenting with the aesthetics of ruination with paint, drawing, jet washing and sanding. The results are beautiful and I am increasingly relaxed about that being OK.