DAY TWENTY TWO

Amateurs, professionals, sharing your work, public art. 
 
My creative endeavours are strictly amateur, for my own amusement and satisfactions. Half the pleasure is in simply learning to do something new and it would be unfair to inflict the results on an unsuspecting relative, still less the public at large. I have shared photography via social media and from time to time been a member of writing groups where typically one reads out a piece of work and receives (kindly) feedback, but the idea of making work for the purpose of public display or publication has never entered my mind. 
 
On the other hand I have a friend, a trained and in my opinion very talented artist. Over the thirty years of our friendship I have known her turn her hands to all sorts of media and each time she knocks it out the park. Even her unfinished works and experiments are impressive. Her notebooks are works of art in themselves. But apart from group and amateur art club exhibitions she has chosen never to finish a substantial project or display her work. I like to think that if I had a fraction of her talent and resources - which include a studio anyone would die for - I would be out there in the world, biffing and boshing and wanting people to take notice. 
 
It interests me that two people at complete ends of the skill spectrum (I have no real talent in any medium, except a talent to have fun with it) should end up in essentially the same space. Among her many quirks she is particularly scathing about public art, the sort of things that well meaning local authorities like to commission when they have the funds. I've never really understood the objection, apart from the fact she thinks there is too much of it, but I can't help wondering if perhaps some of her scorn is connected with her inability to share her own work.
 
What I'm getting at here is the complicated matters of confidence, bravery, trust in oneself, trust in one's work or vision, expression, connection with one's own feelings, openess, trust in others... it's heady, emotional and intimate stuff. Or at least it can be for some people.
 
In saying this I feel I'm straying quite some way from the idea of everyday creativity which is the subject of this blog but the same conderations are there I'm sure, but at a much muted level. If you care about your work, that is. If you feel engaged and connected with it in a way that goes beyond simply the practice of a skill, or as it has been with me, purely for personal entertainment.

The picture above is part of a piece of public art. It's from a historic physic or herbalist's garden. The main part of the piece is a bronze pestle and mortar on a plinth, a pestle and mortar being one of the main tools of the physic's trade. I don't know the artist but there's a part of me which tips my hat in their direction, simply for having accepted a commission, made the piece, and allowed something of themselves to be on display in the world.

Onwards...privately.




 




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