Wednesday 27 March 2013

Barcelona

6 months in barcelona has started! and I have started a Barcelona blog, its a bit more chatty and informal than this so I have kept it separate, be warned it needs heavily editing! http://sculptorinbarcelona.blogspot.com.es/?zx=63f81c1749c8a78f

Saturday 2 February 2013

Welcoming Strangers





    

           


Its funny how as an artist you keep bumping into yourself from the past. Today the studio is bright and shining in the low, much loved, winter sun. If the sun was here all the time I am not sure wether we would notice the things it picks up when it arrives. My focus goes where it lands and today I am supposed to be doing waxes but the sun makes the reddy orange rust on my new Angle sculpture illuminate. It's Saturday, I can do what I want....sort of. 


I have had my new cutouts for some time now and I cant seem to make them out, its like a new person in the room and I am a bit shy of them. When I created them and I was ecstatically inspired, like a flurry of oxygen they whooshed through my veins and I felt more alive than ever. Time passed and they arrived back from the cut out place. Apart from arousing my, possible best kept to myself, deep bedded love of metal, I felt a bit coy. Moody even, with them. 

Today the sun came in and picked them out for me to see. The steel, the colour of the rust, like a painting. The depth of the colours against the hardness and crispness and flatness of the steel. Powerful, not in a soft wobbly silky clay made solid in bronze way, but in a tentative soft pencil sketch easily altered with a rubber, made solid and bold and suddenly very much here kind of way.

Through my engineer the small furry pencil lines, the tentative exploration of form found has become strong angles and perfect circles and through water jets these angles have been cut, cut deep into flat steel. Revealing shapes that enter like strangers into my space.

But today the sun has been kind, it has shown me my past in my future. In the Angel I see all those rust drawings I did at Spike Island, twelve years ago, and they have bumped up from my past to show me that the strangers are linked to my ideas and therefore may be welcome.