I wish I knew less
This weekend I saw Making Sense Backwards: The Nick Bragg Story, a film about Nicholas Burton Bragg, a North Carolina artist. He has a playfulness to his paintings that I find hard to achieve, and I regret that my “formal” training gets in the way of that kind of work.
I started thinking about this when recognizing artists who had really found their own voice. It dawned on me that ultimately the goal is to find your own voice, whatever it is… what makes you different from other artists. And many of the artists that I most respect did find that voice. And a lot of those artists were not very trained, just self-taught.
It makes me think of the quote from Picasso: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
For me personally, I have found it very hard to let the past go, to set your training aside. Just break more rules. I’ve often felt somewhat imprisoned by the training I’ve had. I feel glimpses of it, especially when I do sketches, or something that I just don’t think much about. But I’ve had a hard time translating that into things other than sketches. Sometimes it just amounts to playing more. Doing things you’’ve never done. Putting yourself in that area where you really don’t know. That really interests me.
The risk involved is maybe doing some bad work. Or maybe the work is not as sellable. What interests me more and more is just painting my life, the places, the people… with the hope that I can free myself more. I spent a lot of years trying to duplicate paintings I had seen before, whether it was by old masters or people I revered… trying to paint a Rembrant or trying to emulate teachers, which is a good way to learn when you are starting out. But a lot of that training can eclipse your personal vision. I care less about doing a technically correct painting. And I did start to abandon the kind of work that I trained to do early on, a more classical kind of realism. I got bored with that quickly, it didn’t fit my personality and I lost interest in it.
I think a certain amount of that is fear based. It’s scary going into the unknown. But it’s a place that I would ultimately like to be more often. What that is, I don’t know. But I know that feeling of “I can’t do this well, it’s too scary.”
Painting more dreams, ideas… that always appealed to me. It’s a scary place to be, because when you go there, you have less to rely on, other than your own thoughts. Painting from your own imagination.
This piece is called “Awakening”, it was inspired by a dream I had shortly after I stopped drinking in the 90s. I was surprised it came out of me. It was so unlike other work I’d done. It represents me and the awakening I had when I got sober. I remember going through what they call the “pink cloud” in AA: waking up early enough on Saturday mornings to see the sunrise and know what it feels like to not have a hangover. This is an example of me using female figures to represent myself - I have an urge to connect with my feminine side.
I think it would be liberating to start doing this kind of work again. It would be more personal and fulfilling. I am going to find another drawing I have, called Once I Saw a Man, based on an experience I had when I was drunk and I stumbled across a dead man in an alley in Philadelphia. It’s a very abstract memory… it’s hard to remember those kinds of details, especially from when you were drunk. But that’s something I want to work on next - more personal work like that.