The Self-Isolation Residency 25th June 2020: Day 88

On the nature of Play: a beginner's guide into the nature of experimentation and exploration for children and artists.

 Yesterday I posted of an image of some calculations in one of my sketchbooks with the title 'play' attached, I find myself with a little more time to transcribe some of my notes today so I would like to put a little more flesh on the bones of that post. In the past I have talked about the importance part that the notion of play can contribute to the creative process but I don't think I have expanded upon what I mean by play and how it is creative for an artist to play. When we play as children we tend to let our guards down and move into a world of imagination where anything is allowed to happen without there being any control devices to say 'don't do that'. Wherever these control devises come from, as adults we tend to have then firmly in place and they 'guide' us to fulfill our acceptable place in society. If a person varies too far from these social guidelines their behaviour is seen as aberrant from the social norm. For me it is critical that artists should aberr in this way both for the good of their work and for the betterment of society in general. I intend to expand on how this aberrance helps society at another time, I have already touch on this as part of the essay 'Questions and Paradoxes, Enigmas and Wonders; excerpts from 'the Manifesto of a Global Village-Idiot', the body of which can be read here

Today I wanted to write just as few notes about how as artists we should allow ourselves time to play without any recourse to any judgements that society may wish to place on such behaviour. As a tutor and mentor to artists of all levels probably the inquiry that has been asked of me most often by artists in regards to process is 'should I do this?' Be it about trying a variation in the colours of a paint palette, about carving a sculpture from stone or about visiting a certain exhibition there is always one answer to that question; 'YES'. As an artist if we can imagine an idea we should experiment and 'play' with that idea, there are no wrong ideas, just ones that have not been fully explored and that exploration comes in the form of play. From this exploration we gain knowledge and understanding, it may not be the knowledge  that we hoped or expected to gain and indeed it might not appear to be knowledge that is useful at this particular time, but often such knowledge will kindle the embers of new ideas for our current or future work.

And so back to my own work and that images of my calculations; how can something that looks so regimented as mathematics be considered as play? Attached to this post are images of 3 of the spatial paintings, (above 'Heaven and Earth, Diptych', below 'PMYH' and 'Reality plus 1') which I have completed at various times in the past. These pieces all derive from the historical process of painting with oil paint on a stretched canvas but take that process into previously uncharted dimensions. To create stretchers that curve and twist canvas into these new, 3 dimensional, ways takes both a large degree of childlike imagination but also many hours of design calculations where precision can make the difference between if a piece works or fails. As part of the self isolation residency I have over the last week started work on 4 new spatial paintings of different forms and sizes. Each of these requires a high degree of design work long before paint meets canvas and for the most part that is what I was illustrating with the image of my sketchbook. But that this doesn't explain where the play comes in I hear you ask? Well it comes bizarrely enough in regards to the level of precision that I previously mentioned. Although I have to be very precise when I am designing a stretcher for a piece of work like this I really only have to work to certain tolerances, it's not as though I'm designing a rocker engine. If a piece of the stretcher has to be calculated through trigonometry to fir into a space that is say 12 cm wide the likelihood is that if my calculations get me to 11.95 cm it will be close enough, especially when one considers the vagaries of sawing wood. So once I have achieved the figure of 11.95 why pursue my calculations until I achieve a figure of 12.0000041736? Because I a playing with the process, it may sound a little OCD and perhaps it is, but in making these calculations new possibilities within the creative process can be explored with potentially new, unexpected ends and potentially more satisfactory creative outcomes.