a bit on beauty, art and nature..

So, What is Beauty? Just an easy starter question for Week 2. 

But watching Matthew Collings answering it, or at least attempting to (http:www.bc.co.uk/programmes/b00p05ww), did provoke a few thoughts about thinking more critically about the work I instinctively 'like' or not. Also a few thoughts about my own work. Does beautiful art really:

1. return to nature, or have
2. simplicity
3. unity
4. transformation
5. surroundings
6. animation
7. surprise!
8. pattern
9. selection
10. spontaneity??

Piero della Francesca
Madonna della Miserichordia

Of course, there is no checklist for great art, innovation or talent, but I was surprised by how many of these elements seem to be built, almost without thinking, into the process of making or appreciating something. Maybe the fact that we are attracted to the same properties says more about the nature of human perception - are we really that easy to pin down?

However, Youtube videos on Richard Prince (Continuation Painting) and Jonathan Meese (An Abstract Look at Art) were enough to remind me that, in contemporary art, diversity defies rules.  While Prince works on appropriation, seeing himself as a 'continuation' of previous artistic movements and influences, Meese denies that he has anything serious to say, and that his art is simply the process of playing made visual. That said, he was rather vehement about not having anything serious to say.... But what struck me was that the act of playing, regardless of setting, takes us back to our nature, to 'nature'. In Meese's world, art equals nature - there is no mediating consciousness. Of course, all this sounds a bit like the Process Art movement of the 1960s, which brings us right back to the idea of continuation.... 

I am interested in the many interfaces between nature and art. We see art continually inspiring art - in something like Prince's cultural continuum. In an increasing globalized  virtual world of virtual images, the one John Berger expresses his concerns about in The Shape of a Pocket, not even the man-made objects, but the images of them, seem to cannibalise each other in ever more convoluted and disturbing ways (Hieronymous Bosch eat your heart out). At some visceral level I find this disconnection with real, physical, tactile stuff, nature, the stuff of life, quite disturbing. 

Perhaps that is why I transferred from Fine Art to Fine Art Textiles - not because I don't like to paint (I love it) but because textiles is unashamedly about stuff, materials and the processes of creation, as well as about the rich yet largely unsung and unpretentious cultures of life, living and making that got us to this point. 

With that in mind, two of the tasks I've set myself is to write a short artist statement, and a sentence or two about where I'd like to be in a few years time.
The second one is easier - I'd like to be making, showing and selling work that I am happy with, and making enough money to justify continuing as an active artist. 

Here goes with an artist statement:

'Blood and Salt'

My work looks at the  perception of a human identity in the non-human world. I am interested in the permeation of the consciousness by nature - that gradual awareness and sense of connection with natural processes that is the result of long periods living by the sea, without human contact and in stillness. In relation to this sense of connection, I am exploring what it is to be ‘alive’ as an individual, and as a woman, against that vast backscape of natural processes. The evolutionary association between the salinity of blood and that of seawater (‘blood and salt’) provides a useful metaphor for connection between the human and natural worlds. Women are intricately bound into natural cycles of waxing and waning, creation and disintegration. Over time their eyes and the lines on their faces and bodies relate lifetimes of caring, giving and loss. There are processes of transition and transformation. I am interested in the relationship between tiny and vast, individual and whole. 

Syrian refugee women

Currently, my work is concerned with women and the landscape, with:

• inner landscapes - scales, how the individual relates to the vast scale of natural landscapes and processes
• transitions and edges - autumn to winter, the transition from reproductive fertility to older age, the nature of creativity, creativity as the 'edge' between form/order and freedom
• marks as the stories and 'silent languages' of life - women's lives etched on their bodies and faces, creative potential held even in the sparse marks of winter/old age
• transformation - the sense that the physical and emotional 'fabric' of the individual is changed or re-assembled by experiences

Meanwhile, I have been researching websites and following the advice on www.textileartist.org. This is a useful step-by-step guide to setting up a wordpress website. 

In the next post I will have a look at some art critics and the sorts of things they say about the shows they visit...

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