The importance of having a friend

The importance of having a friend whose opinion you can completely respect and trust might just be the difference between whether an artist will make good work or not.  This friend, formerly known as my best drinking buddy came down to my studio on a slow friday and it was good to have some fresh eyes on my work as well as of course horribly narcissistic.

The pace from last week hadn’t really let up and I liked what I’m doing so I needed to stop and see it through the eyes of someone else.  What I found was that I didn’t think as much about the drawings themselves but how it fitted in with everything else.  The drawing stapled onto the wall above a domestic lights switch weeping fabric, the 8 year old drawing framed on the wall, the row of drawings of cubes in perspective. 

I’ll leave him to have his own words but I saw in an ongoing need to obsessively record pattern and detail, which pulls me into my last point.  Last week, I seemed to have acted like that the work I was making was a chance ‘spontaneous act’ and practically unrelated to my practice.  Whereas in fact the themes in this work actually shares much more common ground that I thought.  I’ll work out if this makes it better or worse.

By the way this is the only one you’re getting.