It seems that direct access to essays written originally on Substack is a complicated thing. At the moment the titles below link through to Substack. I'm now trying to work out how to have pdfs than can be read directly here, but pdf conversion is not straightforward when there are so many images. The only thing that almost works is The Substack Print, which prints three at a time, good, but sometimes misses out a paragraph or image, not so good. I'm slowly trying to edit these. The pdf does upload here, but without any image or title on the thumbnail. Get in touch if you know how to progress this! Unfortunately the current layout works fine on a desktop but is rubbish on a phone.... After the first three pdfs, if you scroll down to No 67, there are some more (though not on a phone... just random chaos there).
I've been writing blogs about making art for many years, but in October 2024 I started writing longer pieces which went back to the beginning of my art experiences and influences. There are over 90 articles now, focussed on what I call my 'intractable questions' about art-making. The first 33 were explorations of my experiences of trying to connect to making my own work, with links out to discussions of things that called me and which I studied, such as Chinese and Indian art, and latterly, Complexity Theory. I took the story up to around 2023 and ended it there for now. I'm still currently publishing weekly, but these are now responses to ideas, other articles, visits to galleries etc. Whatever strikes me as needing to be written about!
1. Who knew that art making would be so complicated?
4. Death by white on white, 1918
5. Chinese landscapes and the ineffable Tao
7. Dark tones
8. Eye to eye - power manifests in stone
9. Teaching and the Chinese dragon
10. Dancing cells
12. Wild Life
13. Everything, everywhere, in an Indian mural
15. Sculpted mountain, starry walkway
16. Why Indian art?
18. How long does an idea take to birth?
19. Dance me to the end of love
20. Peacock world
21. The unseen path
22. Opening to the worlds of others
23. The strange pull of what you love
24. Mysterious protectors, overlapping forms
25. Malay dancers meet flying apsaras
26. In the museum
27. The elusive nature of 'my' art
30. When you force it, you block it
31. Alive with a different kind of energy
32. I wandered through unlikely worlds
33. The free line screams for help
34. Art is made to be seen, but does it always need to be shared?
35. An art investigation: do my images reflect a complexity view of the world?
36. Why aesthetic power matters
37. The powerlessness of so many contemporary images
38. God above, God below: a comparison of visual forms
40. Why I need to stay with the openness that Sustack provides, despite the looming ads
41. Am I in a gallery? Palestinian art comes to Edinburgh
43. Time (1). A theme has no context. Obviously
44. Time (2). How did it feel, to have no history?
45. Time (3). Without context, we lose history
46. When the conversation shifted: from interactive consciousness to internal world?
47. Time (4). The scarred particular
48. Time (5). Cycles, rhythms, and seasons
49. Time (6). The spirals of our lives
51. Progress of a soul: two stories
54. Stolen gifts: Egypt and the Cyclades
55. Trying to digest the whole world
56. Living Traditions 1. Eye to eye: power manifests in stone
57. Living Traditions 2. Everything, everywhere, in an Indian mural
58. Living Traditions 3. Your gorgeous eyes
59. Living Traditions 4. Sculpted mountain, starry walkway
60. Why Indian art?
61. Ancient India, Living Traditions
62. Responses to the land: Millet and Goldsworthy
63. It's December, into the caves
64. The winter field
66. The fifteen shadows of a plum
67. Pelted with coloured stars
68. The lost stupa of Amaravati
69. Slow looking at the sculptures of Amaravati
70. Becoming water
71. I'm begging you to hold on to your imperfections
72. What is a voice?
73. A 'limited' artist and some contemporary drawing
74. Looking for art in all the wrong places
75. Some unexpected paintings on my way to somewhere else
76 'Four girls prove that beauty and business ideas can go together'
77. The curtains that created my world
78. The dead don't go until we do
79. We won't stay silent any longer
80. Who is invited to the city?
81. Erasure held like a fierce lantern
82. Paris eats me for breakfast
83. Poets, musicians, writers, artists, shadow play....
84. Tasting the wine of Montmartre
86. What no-one tells you about 'showing up'
87. When you feel you have a response, trust it
88. Does it take me deeper into the world?
90. Like a stream, never stopping, never rushing, never pushing
91. Can creative flow survive the sticky embrace of the algorithm?
92. Why making art is not an indulgence, or for other people
93. Why do I still feel sad, when I know this is how it goes?
94. Revisiting cycles, rhythms, and seasons
95. Lumping everything together and saying 'it's all AI' is just daft
From here the pdfs are not always in the exact order of publication. This was initially because of technical problems, then later because printed newsletters that were often about a single topic consecutively didn't seem to be enough variety for a one-off read. Bear with me for all these imperfections! Eventually I hope to make new pdfs in order, but the editing process is long and complex because of the images.