The beast

Well, I've finally finished the beast and I've dropped it off in Birmingham. I don't hate it as much, but I certainly don't love it ... I suppose which artist really 'loves' their work? I think being self-critical is part of the dialogue that pushes your work. I quite like some of the close up areas but as a whole I'm not sure if it works, hmmm.

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Painting the beast has been a learning curve for me anyway and has brought up a lot of questions about painting for me, including colour, technicalities also also challenging Modernist structures situated within painting. It's been quite hard working in my study/bedroom (bad times having them in one room!) as I've had to be quite contained in the way I've been working. I love working in a studio where I can attach the work onto the wall to work on it and there are no restraints about spilling or dropping anything and I can have my materials all over the place in a sort of ordered chaos where happy accidents and the occasional process-led epiphany can occur.

It felt really good to finally hand it in and after rewarding myself to a little cake (okay so it wasn't little and who am I kidding, reward is an excuse) I had a right old gander around Digbeth/Eastside and visited the Custard Factory and Ikon Eastside. I finally managed to locate Eastside Projects and visited their current exhibition, Book Show which I've been meaning to do for aaages.

Luckily it didn't disappoint and although the work was extremely conceptual for me, it was particularly interesting to see how books had been interpreted in the sense of them being sequences of spaces and moments. I also saw the crazy offices there which was made by the artists Heather and Ivan Morison (above). At first I thought that it was an installation and thought ... oh wow it looks like actual working offices ... then I realise it err ... was! A brilliant publication called Book accompanied the show (which were only printed as 1000 copies so get yer hands on one!) which I know will prove useful in my research.

I sent off a postcard for the Paris Correspondence School last week as well which is a great project run by Charlie Levine. Lately I've really been enjoying  finding text in old books that I've collected and creating new texts which are removed from their original context(s). This was no exception and I like the fact the the chap that I stuck to the front of the postcard looks so stern and masculine and I thought the text fitted right in,

particularly layered on the image by Max Ernst underneath. I cut the image out from an old Polish banknote that was out of circulation and quite like the layering of different histories that have been made. I discovered afterwards that, the guy, Mikolai Kopernik was a famous Polish astronomer born in 1473 and was actually the person who discovered that the sun is the gravitational centre of the solar system! I sent the postcard by self service for the first time ever and forgot to put an airmail stamp on ... so I'm hoping it does actually reach Paris and is not lost in an international postal void!