Gone Blank Again

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Just watching Portrait Artist of the Decade on the TV (repeat? - I've no idea), and the blank sheet parallel between painting and doing a blog like this jumped off the screen at me. As is often the case, I don't have the first idea what the day's scribble is going to be - not always the case, granted - until I sit down to write it. I guess I made a rod for my own back when I decided at the outset that these pages would definitely not have a theme: unlike quite a lot of bloggers, I don't have the focus of a particular axe to grind, obsession or business to promote. I've always seen this as a kind of open-ended diary/stream of consciousness reflection on whatever takes my fancy, day-to-day; or a recording of other stuff I might currently be involved in. 

Whatever, as a 'trained' artist, having served my dues in the art-school system in the 1970s, and having subsequently been involved for quite a few years with artists' groups and associations - mostly in the seventies and eighties, having done very little since - I still recognise and empathise with 'blank canvas syndrome': that initial moment when starting a painting (or drawing), and being faced with the void of an untouched surface. I always took the view that to prevent total inaction and paralysis, you simply despoil the surface with a random mark, and work from there.

Others will try and instil order to the emptiness from the outset, applying the tried and tested rules of measured drawing and observation to create a structure from within which the picture will emerge. In portraits, some artists will sketch out overall structure and proportions, relationship to surroundings, etc. I, in the very few portraits I ever undertook, started with the eyes, but there you go. Horses for courses, whatever floats your boat, etc.

These days, the same rule applies for me to any of my [jazz] wood or metalworking or toolmaking projects: apply random noise and work back from that: it's so much more satisfying to arrive at the order of the finished object from one's self-generated chaos. Improvisation into structure. It solves the tyranny of the blank canvas, too.

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