On making and then selling art
When I teach art workshops, I often tell the students: you can only draw the way you can draw. This is at the heart of what I think making art is all about – it’s an imprint of you, your unique set of experiences and perspectives. Every mark you make is like a horcrux, a little bit of your soul that gets scattered hither and thither through the world, outliving you in living rooms, galleries, charity shops and museums. For better or worse, you have to own your line, to believe in it whatever foibles and flaws it might expose.
I lean into this idea heavily when I’m working. The line is often wonky, urgent. I’ll get distracted by details too early in the process, as my attention fractures in hundreds of different directions. Then there’s the over-thinking of colour, and of layering things up. Often, half-finished work stacks up in piles for weeks, months, before I go back to see something worth looking at again. All of this reflects quirks within me that have caused no end of personal and professional problems: I sometimes seem to create chaos wherever I go, and have serious difficulties with organisation and focus. In my academic life, I used to leave simple tasks and emails for weeks, months, paralysed by fretting about what to do. Sometimes, the quick response works best…
Old Sigmund Freud had a good word for what creative work does with all these problematic bits of yourself: sublimation. You take whatever psychological problems you have, and transform them into aesthetics. This is a strange alchemy: I don’t know how or why, but somehow, I’m lucky enough to have found a way to do this that a lot of people seem to enjoy and connect with. I’ve recently reached a point where I can’t seem to turn out new work quickly enough for people who want it. I’m astonished and grateful for this in equal measure. Stranger still, the art itself has helped me to deal with these problems. I am still a disorganised, chaotic over-thinker, but I might reply to emails within a week once in a while.
