sleeping on the job

I just read an old blog from 2013 and note that I am again - or worse - still in a similar place. I go around in circles. I have realisations and huge insights, think I know where I am going and then fall asleep - for years. Or go down a wrong track somewhere and get lost.

Yesterday I started getting rid of the last of the big PhD paintings. I was going to burn them in a big sacrifical pyre but gave them away to a good home instead. Today I found a plaster mould of a torso I have been storing carefully in a wooden box under the house for 8 years. As I was putting it in the car for a trip to the tip, it occurred to me that for most of my life I haven't been what I thought I was. I've been struggling with this outdated view of myself for a long time now. It's like I had this idea of an identity - someone I wanted to be - except it's not who I really am at all. 

The 'me' I wanted to be was a classical, traditional artist. I went to art school and for the first 2 years majored in sculpture. I did loads of figure drawing (in the 80s there was a lot of money around to pay models). I learnt how to make moulds and cast in bronze. I took myself off to the anatomy department at UWA to draw dead bodies and babies in jars - because I thought that's what I should be doing. It fit the blueprint. I even made my father complicit in the lie, and when I really think about it, I wonder if it was what he wanted me to be. I was good at sculpture, but switched to painting when I realised it was a lot of tedious work, time consuming and expensive if you needed a proper studio and foundry. I've never considered myself a good painter.

I painted on and off for years but my heart wasn't in it. I struggled like hell to complete the 2 x 2.4 metre square paintings for my PhD exhibition. It was during this debacle that I finally admitted to myself that I hated paint!! I don't like getting it all over me, it's hard to control and I don't even like the results very much. I'm not into texture and the nuances of colour so what's the point?

Taking on the illustration course was me finally admitting to myself that if I was any kind of artist at all, it was an illustrator. And I choose that title very deliberately, because I don't enjoy drawing as many artists do, for the sake of the medium. This is one aspect of my art practice in which I have been absolutely consistent - I don't do art for the sake of art. I do it because it has meaning and I want to say something. Art is in service to me, not the other way around.

So here I am again - grappling with identity but at this mature age, finally getting closer to some sort of realistic artistic identity. And then - it occurred to me today that I am none of the above. That identity is nothing to do with what one does in the material world. 

image: ©Dr Grafix, 'Deconstructivism', collage, watercolour & pen, 2015