On instinct and irrationality

 

Gabrielle Hoad | What the world becomes - work in progress | Oil on window | 2006

While I’ve been convalescing, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on where I came from and where I want to go in art. For reasons to do with background and finance, I’m a very late starter and, looking back, I can see I’ve often been in an almighty rush to move my career along. With maybe only two days a week to work as an artist, I’ve really burned the candle at both ends. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, but it has not come without cost.

One thing I do know is that I haven’t protected my intuition fiercely enough. I’ve applied genuine creative thinking in all sorts of ways: to find my way past administrative obstacles, solve technical issues, write proposals, build connections, create opportunities, be a breadwinner etc.

But while I’ve run around making things happen for myself and others,  I have let the flame that feeds my practice grow very faint indeed. While I've thought a lot about art, I've lost my instinct for making a random but right decision (for example a mark, a gesture, a placing of an object, a quirky edit). The kind of things that might be irrational, inconsequential, even sloppy, but very occasionally are also mysterious, profound and highly charged. 

I think about a painting I made years ago in life class where a thick drip of hot pink spilled down over a pristine silhouette of the model and muddled with some luminous green below. A fellow student exclaimed in pity at this accident assuming I would paint it out, but I already knew it was the best thing that had happened all day. Or the angry moment in my final year at college when I started scribbling on the windows with an oil bar and a gull flew past and I followed it with my hand. It became the degree show piece that finally felt like my own work as an artist, rather than something I was making to meet assessment criteria.

These are things that make art amazing. And in my race to make up for lost time, I think I have let slip my ability to notice and to nurture them.