When I started discussing art again, after a long pause of about 16 years, someone referred to the conversations as ‘talking art bollocks’. A great phrase. I gave an art bollocks talk this week which compounded my feelings of how difficult it is to talk about something so personal, the challenge of engaging an audience in a personal motivation and how much we all want to understand how art communicates. Whether I succeeded is not for me to evaluate; I’ll carry on regardless as artists do. It is still a mystery to me; how a subject, colours and composition can conjure up emotional responses. I know what I like but why? The only people who really measure this are art dealers, the rest of us just perpetuate the mystery
Station to Station 2
sean stroud
Well, as you admitted at the talk last week the very act of giving the talk forced you to reflect on what you do artistically and to try and articulate that to other people. Personally I found your comments very interesting on several levels. I would imagine that some of the other people in the audience enjoyed your comments about your work for other reasons than mine (some of them were artists themselves). Our personal shared links are via our fathers and their own artistic output. I am unable to express myself artistically (or maybe I never had the chance or gave myself the chance to do so) and I am grateful for any insight that an artist that I like can provide about what they do and why they do it..