Creativity takes courage and
one of the biggest challenges
facing an artist is keeping the
creative juices flowing
E
dgar Degas once said: “Art is not what you see,
but what you make others see.”
Such is the gift of the artist, where every nuance
is observed and considered; taking something often seen,
or commonplace and drawing out of it some extraordinary
element, thus to enable us to view it with a new pair of
eyes. Creativity takes courage and one of the biggest
challenges facing an artist is keeping the creative juices
flowing and not to settle into a groove.
With this in mind, I set myself a new project each year
and take time to experiment in order to find ways to keep
my work fresh. It may be simply tackling a new subject,
or perhaps choosing a different medium to work in.
Last year was no exception and the inspiration struck after
I happened upon a piece of weathered driftwood on the
foreshore.
Quite remarkably the relentless and continuing effects of
time and weathering had created the view of the scene of
the estuary in front of me. Although in the past I’ve created
assemblages using various found objects, this natural
phenomenon planted the seed for a new direction based
on interpreting the landscape from elements actually
found within the found object.
For the past three decades, the Exe Estuary has been
the mainspring of my art and I’ve captured its many moods
in just about every medium possible. Characterful old
wooden boats have always been one of my favourite
subjects, but the stories behind them are equallyimportant. Appropriately many of these
weathered fragments are the remains of old
wooden boats themselves, and I soon found
that the aged, weather-worn patina became
the focus of the work itself.
Working with this stimulating material not
only brought a deep respect, but also an intimate
relationship with the subject. These simple pieces of
wood have already known previous lives, but have long
been discarded as spent, yet they still speak and invite
rebirth. Their multi-layered surfaces of neglect and decay
reveal great riches of beauty. My aim for this project was to
use an assimilation of diverse materials, searched for, or
encountered by chance and then to reconstruct to give
a new meaningful significance.METHOD AND MATERIALS
Of course, an assemblage not only relies on what material
is found, but also the intuitive way in which it is putTop tip
Leave materials
grouped in piles on
the floor over time
to see if they work
well together