Further to my goal to better preserve my studio time in 2010 (after the chilling revelations discussed in this post), you may start to notice an increase in studio-related posts on this blog in the interests of self-enforced accountability. This is the first of such entries in what we might call the sobriety-sponsor relationship; however, given that my priority this week is to treat my studio to a long-overdue scrubbing and re-organization, we’ll have to backtrack a week for the art itself.

In between the eradication of studio projects no longer relevant to my interests - the bluebottle fly mortuary, for example, or the baby-spider incubator - I unearthed stacks of ephemera from my MFA schooling, including an assessment from my former supervisor Louise Hopkins, who was kind enough to open her report with a remark on my “sense of difference, deviation and stubbornness,” among many reiterations on the value of experimentation. Perhaps most useful to the end-times of my Glasgow schooling was her observation that my drawings at the time “are perhaps too polite and pretty for the subject matter, and not harsh enough.”

Charming though it is to know that anyone could ever describe me as both “too polite” and “not harsh enough,” I remain glad that two years of working with teenagers managed to blunt some of the prim and proper tendencies in my drawing style. I developed a certain envy for their messy paint-flinging ways that came home with me to the studio after most teaching days (mentally, I mean, not just splattered all over my clothes and boots), and I’ve found myself in a process of refining that sloppiness ever since.

I find Christmas a strangely ideal time to experiment with technique because I’m producing art that will be given away as gifts to friends and family, free to exist in blissful isolation from the rest of my studio practice should anything go horribly wrong. For this year, I focused on fusing the rather precise bees from my Age of Enlightenment series of book drawings with the unpredictable ink spills I’ve been applying to other drawing situations in hopes of producing something less - to use Louise’s term - “polite.”

Initially, the labour involved in bringing the accidents of ink to some manner of resolution had me convinced that the mess had been too extreme. However, my recipient-friend’s comment that the resulting drawing is “gory” was greatly satisfying, especially given that these are also experiments towards a prospective body of work on Evelyn Dick. For the present, however, finding a more visceral means of rendering these threatening insects has been a useful step forward.

As a curious sidenote, while riffling through old studio papers and the bottoms of damp cardboard boxes (something in there smells like fish guts, and for once I don’t want to know why), I unearthed this scrap of vellum, also from the MFA era. Memory tells me I had traced this text from a jar of honey - though it’s not just honey, it’s M&S New Zealand Clover Honey. Still, it’s nice when snippets gathered four years ago prove themselves relevant to present research. The rest is off to recycling of a different sort.

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