An extremely satisfying set of fails today which is encouraging for resolving this piece over the next few days. Inspired by a workshop I did in December at The Art House in Wakefield, I eventually got around today to putting aside puppet and stage manufacture and turned to a mono printing session. The uncontrollability of the first few passes and mixing of techniques means that nothing is as expected and every time the paper is pulled away, I get a fresh insight into what ma

Woke in a panic this morning. Too many deadlines approaching, and I need to move up a few gears. So instead of rushing into the studio, I took time out to go and sit and make lists of what I needed to do and source. This required crystallising some technical bits for staging and presentation of one artwork I’m working on. So it was a process of drawing diagrams and becoming lost in 3D imaginary projections and working through how things would fit together. It works on paper.

I’m becoming a bit more relaxed each day posting the normally hidden pages of my sketchbook and related messings. Working in a open plan studio is something I’m used to, and that’s very exposing, but it’s still possible to hide stuff you can’t bear the idea of other people seeing. But I’ve reached a point already where I’m able to step back from the immediacy of unsatisfactory result, and recognise it as all part of this project, this journey into the unknown. I’m still fiddl

A reflective weekend. In pursuit of Slowness. 24 hours away from all online activity, allowing focussed concentrated reading and note making on real paper in real books. In this way, the sketchbook journal resumes its status as a focus for all ideas development in my life. This is how it should be. The book I can’t leave home without. The reflection of me and who I am. And it’s freezing cold everywhere today and I can’t get warm even close up to the fire. So I use some nasty

Sculpting and exploring puppetry is pretty forgiving in terms of outcome. Almost anything looks quirky/interesting/funny. But the outcome even on first attempts represents hours of practice observing people, faces, bodies, movement. And hands and feet. Hands and feet are my bugbear. I have shockingly bad eyesight, so in all the years of life drawing and figure drawing, I have never been close enough to actually see any detail. So I’m fine with a suggestion, an impression of h

The best type of glorious failure today. I have been playing around with surfaces for making shadow puppets, and had read that Ivory Board (which is neither ivory nor board, being simply a bright white smooth cardstock) of a certain weight would take on a nice translucency once oiled out after painting with watercolour. So all I wanted to do was throw some watercolour onto the surface in preparation for oiling, and since I had a figure in mind, the daubings took on a figurati

Playing around with puppet ideas, it occurs to me that it is very enjoyable to scribble without worrying about result. I read an article this morning by Tim Harford who has a book out called Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. He talks of no easy universal solutions to life’s problems; instead “ we must adapt—improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward”. Music to my ears. In my ot

This is already an interesting journey with gradually evolving limitations and premises. I need to clarify that it’s more about accepting failure as a concomitant part of risk and challenge, rather than striving to fail as such. But having said that, embracing failure is an important part of the process, and the interesting bit for me is taking the risk element and seeing what happens when I do something I don’t really want to do work-wise. When I don’t want to do something,

I couldn’t resist it. New year, new project. Driven by the one thing I regularly do not do enough of despite knowing that it is massively important for successful creativity. Confronting failure head on. Sketchbooks and journals are usually private; unpressured by threat of exposure, the artist is free to experiment and build up a catalogue of glorious failure as a platform to learning and progress. Sketchbooks are frequently only revealed after sanitising and cleaning. What