Time to think.

I had a day in London yesterday. I've been a bit lax with getting up there this year. There was some interesting stuff, some of which will pop up here over the next few posts.

I went to Tate Modern among other places. I don't very often as a lot of the time they seem to take a ridiculous amount of space to do very little and the crowds mean you can't easily see what they have done. In fairness to them, their approach to hanging seems to have evolved a little and more of the collection was on display than I have seen in a long time.

It is the first time that I have seen the giants of 20th century art since my practice began to settle down and find its own language and rhythm and I found that interesting. Late Monets, Rothkos, Guernica-period Picassos, Beuys and many others try and get your attention.  The 21st century is also beginning to be represented now - we're far enough into it to be able to take a bit of perspective on this too and get a sense of how things are beginning to develop now.

It struck me that almost all these works have one thing in common; the market they were made for was not the normal art market; it was the museum market. The pieces have scale, challenges and even unpleasantness and yet they are all capable of being summed up in a sentence or two. In many cases this summing up renders the artwork redundant. This realisation has absolutely clarified where and what I am in the here and now. Technically and aesthetically, I aim to have my work reach museum standard. I regularly produce passages of paint where it is but am not yet sustaining it over a whole painting. Otherwise, for the moment at least, I do not want to take the route of making museum pieces. My work is domestic in nature and scale and I should be proud of this, I should be shouting it. My pieces are things you could live with every day, that you can spend time with every day, that do not become stale and do not overwhelm a room. My content is meaningful but not challenging. My paintings simply proclaim "this is where I am, this is my relationship with it, now do with it what you will (and by the way, I really like paint!)" There is more to them of course; painting is a good tool for exploring and understanding but I don't want that purpose to get in the way of the painting and I don't care if anyone else decodes that. Its more important for me that someone with no knowledge of my intentions can engage with the work easily and find their own meaning within it.

So yes, its time to think, then it will be time for me to re-write my Artist's Statement, then it will be time to stride forwards with new confidence and a better understanding of my place in the art world. In the meantime, I'll make more of an effort to get round the more challenging part of the arts scene more often... :-)