Recently, I've stopped timestamping all of the stuff I do in my sketchbook/journals and I've found that it has done wonders to my level of motivation. I've stopped worrying about how many pages I'm using, stopped feeling like I need to document everything, and I just let loose. I guess I'm just trying to do as much as possible, because the more I do, statistically, the more I'll like. Also, trying to change the way I use my sketchbooks. I can recognise that I've focused heavily on my sketchbooks, treating them as the centrepiece of my work. Now, I'm trying to think of my sketchbooks as just that - spaces for experimentation and trials and idea creation. I want my process to become less linear and branch out into different formats, i.e., not to be so afraid to depart from the 2-d off-white A5 page of my moleskines. I'm going to buy oil paints tomorrow and pick up some scrap plywood from the USyd Architecture building. I even, quite viciously, deconstructed a Year 11 scultpure I had hanging around, salvaged the wire I used for it, and, quite viciously, sawed apart the balsa base it was on. #reuse #recycle
It may have been something I read, or it may have been my mum who said it, but I am very much a dabbler in that I try out all these different things, but I'm not 'specialised' in anything. I want the fragmented ways that I use all these different materials to come together somehow into some sort of 'style'. Then again, a 'style' only comes with time, experience and perseverance. A while ago, I was thinking about how Picasso and Mondrian both started off with very conservative subjects and compositions, but of course, they are both known for their heavily abstracted paintings. I look forward to the day when (hopefully) I can look back at the stuff I made in my late teens/ early twenties and be able to trace the progression of my work.
Personally, I love very abstract, postmodern works, such as Sol Lewitt's wall drawings. I think what's interesting about it is not so much about the end product than it is about the formulaic process of installing it, and the very manner of it Being there (directly on a gallery wall, site-specific, inevitably temporary). I also think that Anish Kapoor is a genius. Recommended viewing: Oracle (black void in sandstone), Void (blue bowl shape mounted on wall), When I am Pregnant. These three in particular made me question my visual perception, and heightened the senses outside the traditional five as I tried to decipher this object (or absence of object) and how it could physically be so. Delightfully unsettling.
I was going to write about how I don't want to force abstraction in my work, because I think it works best when it comes more spontaneously and conceptually. But since I went on a tangent about installation and sculptural art, I think would love to explore space (not the starry kind) in my work. I wish I had the means and the conceptual ability to create large-scale sculptures, but then again, this post is really beginning to flop right now so I should concede that I failed to plan it and now have nothing end it
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