BEING BAD

TULIPS

As you may have noticed earlier this week my watercolour “skills” are appalling if not non-existent. Often my drawing skills go out the window as I labour to get the colour onto the page in some kind of intelligible way which will explain the short-assed tulips here. Oils are much more my medium.

TULIPS AND MY NEIGHBOUR AND PAL

Still I am determined to get some colour into my sketch pad so you’ll have to bear with me. I have heard it said that to be an artist you need to to be able to be a bad artist-something which a lot of people seem to have taken too much to heart in recent times. This just means that you have to be prepared to make alot of mistakes and to turn off your inner-critic to carry on. It doesnt mean of course you should hang these mistakes in a gallery and charge €1000 for them.

ABANDONED PRELIMINARY SKETCH FOR SAN FRANCISCO TO YOSEMITE

Having said that some “mistakes” can end up being very successful or popular, like this preliminary sketch I abandoned. More than once I have had people in my studio who have ignored my “masterpieces” for some abandoned scrawl on a paper or board.

SAN FRANCISCO TO YOSEMITE (OIL ON BOARD)2006

So I sat at my front door in the cold, with my tongue jammed out to the side, sitting splay-legged on the cold ground (for the first time in years it came back to me that sitting on cold ground can give you piles, but I don’t know if this is true?)and produced these tulips which I am showing them to you to prove to myself that I can suffer being bad-you’d think I’d be used to it by now of course. Be assured that they ain’t going to be hanging in any gallery any time soon.