Ok, so I’ve done some further thinking.
This blog is ultimately looking at the creative process from my personal perspective.
It began with the 365+ digitally-created self portraits of 2010-2011, a social media project projecting and exploring the presentation of self in an era of over-proliferation of posted self-portraits. Not a few people who actually know me in real life were unsettled by my frequently unflattering self-portraits as I tried to draw, paint and photograph each daily image from a ruthlessly honest and self-critical perspective. Funnily enough, I never saw them as that negative. Bit on the other hand, I reached the point where these self-mediated self-representations couldn’t really be seen as honest self-appraisals (work that one out) since I began to recognize the desire to exaggerate, amuse, irritate and create beautiful imagery began to prevail.
In an effort to focus once again on the honest self-appraisal-as-artist-thingy, I decided at the start of this year to instead revert to real paper and real pens and paint, and post a routine daily sketchbook exploration of inauspicious and unprepossessing and unlikely subjects just to see where things led. The sketchbook is the place where you can safely explore and make mistakes and generate great things from the things which don’t work so well. Hence the importance of “failing”. If you don’t have failures in your sketchbook, you aren’t pushing the boundaries enough.
I’m still inspired by the idea of posting on the creative process, but I’m changing the title. Not everything is a failure, of course. But inspiration and platforms for progress come in many different forms and so by changing the title I’m opening up the subject.
Everything in my sketchbook, whether text, drawing or scraps of paper and attached tickets from days out is grist to my mill.
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