a crutch is to lean on
where we get off the boat, for now.
After posting yesterday, I buckled down and went to work. Two of the artists in the studio stopped by at points and mentioned that I was quiet, or looked “serious.”1 And I was, I suppose. I took what I’d been thinking about, what I’d learned on Monday, and built a new boat. I'm much happier with the process to get there, and I'm perfectly okay with the results. There is still something there that I want to explore, but it’s a bit more ambitious than I either want or feel like I’m able to do here in the Hackney Wick studio, away from my home base and my tools in Philadelphia.
But more importantly, I thought a lot about that question of process versus result as I was working. And I thought about the idea of having a crutch when making art. We think of crutches as bad. You know what I mean by a crutch — something you lean on. Like, a safe space, a thing you go back to when you need to retreat from going forward. But you know, I’m not sure that’s accurate. Perhaps we can shift our perspective and view a crutch as a key. Maybe that old familiar is really the thing that you rely on to open a door. I’m thinking about the way I work and the things I use, and that’s where I am landing today. I want to do X, Y, and Z with these boats, and I need my stuff to do it. Without these tools and materials, I am not able to do the work that I have in my head, that I want to do. And that’s fine. It’s not a crutch, and I should not feel bad about it.
But it also means I got done what I can, I got these stupid canal barges out of my system for now, and I can move on. I’m getting off the canal barge.
Thinking about the barges made me try very, very hard to manipulate material into the form I had in mind. I’m reversing course today and will let the material dictate the form. Which means I’m not sketching or drawing, like I felt I needed to do with the boats. I’ll dig through the communal pile, see what’s there, and start cutting. Let’s see what happens.
I had dinner last night with Tom Gauld, an illustrator whom I have long admired and sometimes been rightly jealous of. I’ve enjoyed discussing collage for four days, but I was even more at home sitting at the Prince George Pub talking pens and inks and publishing. If you don’t know Tom’s work, you should. He just completed a huge piece for the NY Times that will knock off your socks. The best thing is that Tom is SUPER nice: he paid for dinner.
Thanks for reading!
I hope I wasn’t rude. I was just thinking, hard.
Hard things are hard! Sticky things are sticky! I love that you’re challenging yourself and your art in your current home, Hackney Wick(y)! 😅
I dig tagging along with you on this. I understand your frustration and also appreciate it. I think sometimes we need stuff to not work exactly the way we think it should to bump us out of a rut or shake up our routine to make us think about something else or think differently. One of the YouTube channels I follow was talking recently about Mickey Mouse park. It's a field behind the Disney animation studio in California and was Walt's original plan for making a theme park. It didn't work out, but because it didn't, we have Disneyland instead! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FpB6RnkNxE)
So, just because a project doesn't go how we envision it or want it to go, who knows what door that will open for something even better!
So. Stinking. Jealous. you had diner with Tom Gauld. Love his work.
Interested to see what sails when you get back home. Seems like you enjoyed this endeavor.