Resolved

I started writing earlier but it was a confused rant about not feeling able to verbalise something. It was not published.

I’ve stepped back, had a word with myself and a blether with others and now I’m back.

Im feeling pulled in an artistic direction which I thought was alien to begin with. But I’ve taken a breathe. I’ve allowed myself to be interrupted and now I realise that I’m being navigated back to real process and action. Backwards is not regression, instead it is a positive. I’m re-working ideas which have held their strength and their value.

In MY day if I wanted to work through an idea or something I’d need to leave the studio, walk to the library, cross reference, photocopy it, if I had credit on my photocopy card, cut it to fit my sketchbook, stick it in my sketchbook, wait fir the glue to dry, close the sketchbook, put it in my bag, walk back to the studio, open the sketchbook and then start drawing out my thoughts.. I’m pretty sure that the walking to and from were a positive contributor to the work, the thought process and my well being. Now?? All done in front of a single computer and in a glazed automatonic state.

Hmm. I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

Slated

In 1990 the lending library at Glasgow School of Art was coated with a velvet silence, as all libraries should be. The gradual introduction of macs into a wee corner to the right, heralded a huge learning curve for this artist. And it saw a clumpy, awkward progression of my writing into the virtual world.

I have a real love of the visual imprints of text on paper. Mark making goes hand in hand with the artists heart. Producing my naive first year essays on an electronic typeriter was a noisy event. Whirrs and swearies as I misspelt. Buggars and huffs as the inbuilt correction system grew to hate my speedy touch typing. If I could just point out at this stage, THE most useful thing I EVER did at secondary schooI l was to take Secretarial Studies. I shit you not.

When the day of writing the full version of my 10,000 word dissertation dawned, I silently thanked the temperamental teacher who’d gritted her teeth through my complaints.. My pinkie finger was too wee to make an impact on the keys in the beginning. When the modern machines arrived, my tiniest of digits breathed the biggest of sighs.

As I was saying, the lending library entered the modern era and hours of Pagemaker lessons by Robert the Tech began. How he ever endured our creatively obtuse brains I will never know. But I thank him all the same. I tell a wee white lie sometimes that I am not computer savvy. Really, I know what I am doing, it just doesn’t fit with the affected silent air which this artist likes to portray on occasion. Typing on computers is my guilty pleasure.

Skip to now, and the whole bloody bus is tapping away. Difference is (and this is crucial to the creation of AN ARtist Interrupted) I DON’T want to just post a paragraph, a snippet, a smart arse retort. I MISS extensive writing. I crave the rewrite. I hanker for the face to face dissertation meetings with a certain Historical and Critical tutor, who more often that not, loved my writing and ergo pushed me onto produce a creative almost sculptural piece of work.

So consider myself slated. I’m writing again and not for anyone but me. An Artist Interrupted.