Many people have asked me how things are going in England, hoping to hear fabulous stories of our Second Grand Overseas Adventure (the first being our Japan junket). Sorry to disappoint, but I’m finding England to be simply dreadful.
Monthly Archives: June 2006
Wrestling with the Omnibus Artist Statement
This week and last I’ve been busy trying to write an artist statement. I started with some notes, and then some research, and now a deep sense of doom and futility. Why? Well, an artist statement is supposed to encapsulate the artist’s ideas about their practice in approximately one page. Mine is currently running to about 15 pages. Single spaced. At last count it was about 7500 words. It’s about evenly split into thirds: one-third of that is quotes from texts I’ve been reading, one-third is my responses to the quotes, and one-third is stuff that I’ve come up with independent of quotes. Add to that another couple of pages of miscellaneous notes, lists of terms to define, and subjects for further research, and you can get an idea of the unwieldiness of it all.
Concerns About My Studio Practice
Deciding to work on an all-digital studio practice was not without its worries. In conversations with friends in Saskatoon in the summer before coming to England, I talked about my frustrations with creating digital works, and how those frustrations had led me to abandon—temporarily—digital practices.
Why I Haven’t Been Blogging
I’m sure you’ve all been wondering where I’ve been, and why I haven’t been blogging, so here’s the explanation. After the first time around, back before the blog was actually public, I realized that if I didn’t make a habit of posting every day, I’d eventually get stuck in the trap of having too much inertia to overcome in order to post again. I’d accumulate so much stuff to post that I wouldn’t be able to set aside the time to write about it. So when I did my stretch of daily posting for months on end in 2005, I had made a mental contract with myself to never miss a day.
State of the Ed
I know it’s been ages since I last wrote here. There have been a number of reasons for this. I hadn’t planned to go into silent hibernation for so long. Part of it was my motivation for writing and posting to my blog, which I’ll get to soon. Seeing as I’m not in Japan, and won’t be there in the foreseeable future, this space is no longer going to be about the land of the rising sun. Instead, I’m going to be posting more about my art practice, as I try to return to the path of being primarily an artist, as opposed to someone who identifies themselves based on their current “money job” and secondarily as an artist. Oh yeah, and rants about England. I’m likely to be posting lots of those.