I don’t know about you

 

I don’t know about you but when the going gets good, I like to stop, and do something completely different.

I’m moving studios and so I’ve decided to make a inventory, which would be a collection of drawings of everything in my studio. 

And this satisfies me.  There’s a nice arty flavour in the word ‘inventory,’ I mention it to people and they like the sound of it, and there’s a little history of me doing stock takes of my life, which bolsters the rather lame first reason.

I’ve made three drawings that I like starting with my very favourite things, chairs and clothes.  I’m grooving on making more of the way I draw with outlines in pen, by describing the grain of the wood against the seams in the jacket, and then I sit back at the end of the day and I start looking through some photographs on my camera.

I’ve been taking pictures of domestic furniture that I find on the street and it’s not particularly interesting yet but I start thinking about printing them out and drawing from them, recreating an idea of a domestic location. 

And this satisfies me.  Not long after I’ve added ‘print out street furniture’ to my to-do list than I start looking at some photos of Matt’s new flat.  He’s just moved in so it’s very stripped back with dodgy wallpaper and wiring and angles and it reminded me of the photographs I took of this flat when I moved in here last year.

And now I’m thinking I should print these out, on thick paper, because I’d like to make some 3-D models, like small, absurd structures with them.  And I was thinking of how the surface of the photographs of dodgy wall paper and lace curtains and the angles of doors would become distorted.  And this satisfies me.

And then I got home and I started to re-draft an article I’m working on called The Spectacle of Looking, that I gave as a talk in May at the National Gallery.  

And it’s like the episode in Buffy where she can hear people’s thoughts and then it gets too much and she locks herself in her room until Angel brings a heart to cure her, although obviously not the last bit and only slightly like the first bit.

So in short. I’m in my studio for the next few days and I am going to make an inventory of my studio, which will be a collection of drawing, and it will satisfy me.