A long and frustrating day, how I ache to make art but I seem to expend huge amounts of energy barely doing anything, spending long times caring for existing work, promotion, record keeping.
First, I added this year's art exhibitions to my website: Bickerton, Art Fair Cheshire, NEORENAISSANCE in Nantwich Museum, and the Macc Art Lounge display. Like most artists in Britain I had zero exhibitions in 2020 so these opportunities should be celebrated.
I had an email request for an image for the NEORENAISSANCE Online exhibition press release, so set up the room to take a few photos. This was time consuming as it involved choosing a painting and unwrapping it. Hanging these are often a problem because paintings tend to swing down and forwards when suspended from a thread. The solution is to fix the thread though an eyelet or something in the top and back of the artwork, so I had to do that, then get changed, set up the camera, and take a few photos. None of this was strictly necessary, but for a press release or exhibition announcement, I think it's important to have a face in the picture, the artist and a painting, to tell the story in an image.
This all took about 3 to 4 hours, and when doing so I noticed that one painting in storage had a scratch in the sky, a 15cm mark caused by an accident a few days earlier. So in the afternoon I took out the easel and prepared to repair it. The painting took only about 15 minutes of work to fix and the result was perfect, invisible, but taking out everything and putting it away (including carefully packing the painting) each took about 40 minutes.
Then I discovered another painting, 'So, How Have You Been?' had it's Perspex chipped right in the middle; it was ruined, so I had to de-frame it and remove the plastic.
On the broken Perspex I experimented with possible fixes to the chip and made some deliberate scratches to try and fix them. I used a heat-gun and blowtorch, which worked well at removing scratches, but also tended to bend the whole plastic and/or create air bubbles. Then I tried acetone, which had surprisingly little effect. I then sanded the surface and used acetone to clean the white powder. This worked best but the fine scouring of the sanding remained very visible. Perhaps a dedicated acrylic plastic polish would fix it after this.
Anyway, these tedious and effortful tasks took me beyond 4pm, by which time I felt that I'd hardly done anything with the day despite working constantly.
Then I mastered the Nightfood tracks, and finalised the artwork. the art is quite nice for this (as it is for The Myth of Sisyphus). When will it be seen by anyone? One day for certain, yes.
Then I started finalising a new edit of the I, Spider video for the new Tree of Keys release. This, again, is an old video, created in a hurry for ArtSwarm. I feel I need to make it as good as I can, yet it feels so Sisyphean to work at it, perhaps because I've worked on it for many hours before... the hard rock-roll of art, a self-driven job in pursuit of doing things better. If it is easy, it is not good, so effort is part of the artist life.
New videos of Plastic Superman, Take This Rose, and perhaps Dream of the Tao are needed, all revisions of older work, but perhaps not great changes are needed. I feel exhausted, working hard to stand still, and my eternal headache continues each day, but work I will, twice as hard, three times, to push forwards and onwards. One day I'll push through the dark trees into a blissful green field of sunshine and freedom.
