Indian ink sketches

Posted by webadmin on March 7, 2016 in Studio Practice | Comments Off on Indian ink sketches

My creativity is going into new places—some changes I deeply regret, others I recognize as inevitable—I am returning to painting having back-grounded it in the past to my ceramic practice while creative non-fiction writing is enthusing me too; I am turning disappointment into determination. Drawing with ink is a start. Click on any image in the gallery to see more detail.

Art is difficult. Every artist struggles with the difficulties of making, when I used to teach and demonstrate ceramic techniques to various pottery groups I had the feedback that I made it look easy. Never mind the twenty-plus years of learning, mistakes, misfiring, and hard work—there had to be an easy technique, a secret to be learnt which I had to pass on. Therefore, any failure and lack of talent of the student was my fault? The best career advice I have found comes from How to Make a Living as a Painter (Harris, 1954, p. 23-24) ‘any painter (artist) must have, is a capacity for hard work and unremitting effort’, and later ‘a painter needs an alert power for self-criticism’; that book had several print runs over ten editions between 1954 and 1978 and is still remarkably readable.