I don’t feel much like writing today, and writing is more awkward than usual as I am unwell.
Nevertheless, I like to try and maintain consistencies in my life and works as much as I can.
This discipline really stems from decades of having little discipline and anything but continuities, as I scratched and searched, climbed and fell, wandered and got lost throughout my 20s and 30s.
Just what your ‘consistencies’ might be, is, I suspect, something that many or most artists are searching for.
It’s a thrill to locate and consolidate some idiosyncratic ideas, processes, styles, or tones.
At the same time, there is that contrary urgent to disrupt habits, to spill the ink a little and to see what else might be going on just beyond or around the identity you have started to recognise and make visible to others in your work.
Making choices to do this and not that, to read this and not that, to be interested in this and not that, and to return to this or that in order to mine it a little further is all part of that discipline.
some of our consistencies may lack depth and therefore give us only a relatively fleeting satisfaction, whereas the consistencies we are really and ultimately looking for are the ones we can come back to again and again, or perhaps shuttle between repeatedly, and which keep showing us more, new and different connections.
In this way the ‘discipline’ of the artist is not perhaps the same as that of the soldier or accountant, but a kind of joyful sense of recognition, of re-cognition, of return, of reverb and revision, of looking again and again at and for something that you, and only you* know is there, even if you never get to see it fully or clearly.
* ‘Only You’ was a previous title of this Blog if you scroll way back, prior to it being changed to the current: ‘A Few words A Week On Art & Life In London’
'ONLY YOU' – A few words on Art and Life In London, by Art Writer Paul O'Kane 