“Ask an impertinent question and you are on your way to a pertinent answer.” Bronovsky  Questions are always more interesting than answers. Questioning is a way of being political in a less demonstrable way than propaganda or more didactic art forms. Lesson 60 Make a work of art the requires the viewer to question their assumptions.

Art is forever youthful.  But do not mistake youth for originality, the new or modern. Lesson 59 Don’t regret getting old. Artists should get better the older they are.

The skill you need to master is not to give up. Rejection can hurt, but an artist’s life is full of rejections. Galleries, competitions, residencies. You need to have a thick skin. If you enter art competitions most likely you will be paying not to be in an exhibition.  To be an artist tenacity is essential.  A 1st at University is no guarantee, particularly if you give up at 30 or 40. Often it’s not the high flyers that succeed […]

Form and Content “…in art, the form is always more than form.” Milan Kundra As a student in 1967 I was told that “if you look after the form the content will look after itself!” This was a time when formalism ruled. Being perverse I thought at the time  that, equally, if you look after the content the form will look after itself! Which is a much more radical idea. In reality nothing looks after itself. Still, in 1967 I […]

Art Prizes Competitions are for Horses. There was a symposium at Coventry University on Art Prizes a few of years ago. Representatives of the John Moores and Marmite Prizes were in attendance along with Graham Crowley on the panel. I suggested that they should put all the names of the people who apply to these prizes in a bucket and pick the exhibition at random that way, saving on paying a judging panel and admitting such competitions are a lottery […]

Reflections on National Identity National identity is propped up by a false yet reassuring sense of the continuity of tradition. Our traditions are rarely as old or as ethnically harmonious as ‘tradition’ might imply. With terms such as Frog, Kraut, Macaronis and Roast Beef, we see food used as  derogatory nicknames for stereotypes of national identity and even of regionally identity, as in terms such as Scouse. Food is central to our understanding of National Identity, as with the ‘national […]

It’s a Joke As a title ‘It’s a Joke‘ has the capacity to subvert the meaning of any image. ‘It’s a Joke’ is ambivalent, it is contradictory as a statement. It can be taken at face value but the reading is more evidently ironic. Take any image, a still life, a photo of Margret Thatcher or the Queen, and image of a nuclear bomb, the Houses of Parliament, a map of any country, any image, anything and title it – […]

Style is a frock Dave Hickey.          

The Queen’s Fanny   Henry Moore had a dignified, conservative and down to earth image, and he spoke about his work straightforwardly with measure. For many, his work has an erotic dimension, yet Moore always resisted talking about his sculpture and sexuality, saying only that his work obviously did relate to sex as both were about ‘form‘. In 1978 on an BBC Arena television programme, Henry Moore talked about the Leonardo anatomical drawings in the Queen’s Gallery, part of the […]

To Frame or Not To Frame. The Window on the World and the Object.   “Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.” Claude Debussy   Conventions are too readily observed without question and also discarded without understanding what they do or why they were employed in the first place. There is nothing wrong with breaking the rules but you need to know what the rules are before you break them and you also need to be […]