Artist talk for POLYply at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, Royal Holloway University, London - 14 March 2013

I am an artist. I am an idiot.

Vincent Van Gogh said “Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don’t know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter, ‘You can’t do a thing’. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of `you can’t’ once and for all.”

I am an idiot, according to Van Gogh. Perhaps that’s why I’m not a painter. Indeed I am not a painter. Rather I have been cohabiting with blank canvases in my studio for the last year, thinking about how to approach them and what to do with them. A friend (a painter) gave up painting because she was overwhelmed by the fear of committing to the mark on the canvas, paralysed by the thought that its potential would instantly be dashed, her credibility with it. She knew there would be no going back.

This is my point of departure…

   

Supporting material for the talk included excepts from Moby Dick, Chapter 42 - The Whiteness of the Whale.

 

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Artist  talk for This Is Not A School at Five Years Gallery, London - 14 October 2011

I am Thinking / You are Thinking

Three 20-minute lectures concerning the immediacy of everything, altogether at the same time, there and then.